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For years I have grown plants from seeds. I've done OK in the past, but I've had a problem keeping the flats moist and the seeds growing . The fact that I wanted to grow enough to put around the yard ( an acre) meant that I had to plant thousands of seeds. And keep them alive long enough to plant. This is what I have come up with: 
For small seeds I have found that the Pro-seeder, the round pictured at the left, works well. It comes with 3 tips for use with different size seeds. I have planted some very small seeds with this, such as Petunia and Foxglove, and it works well. If you get one the directions will show the seeds placed in the gray dish that comes as part of the unit, this I don't use. I found that the gray dish has too much static electricity for this to work well. I created a small paper bowl, seen in the upper right of the picture at the left. This works very well and you get kind of a rhythm seeding the trays. For larger seeds I use my tweezers which are easy and effective. I found that the red is not good at all for planting my flats. It too also  has too much static electricity, and I need
1 seed per cell. I use to plant the seeds in trays of 100,
but then I had too many trays. This year
I bought some 256 & 512 cell trays from
a local greenhouse that seeds his own trays.
These have worked out GREAT with some other
improvements I've made. As you can see by
the picture on the right I built a wood tray
with a piece of plywood with some pine 1
X 2 for sides and them lined it with 4 mil
plastic. This allows me to take the tray
with filled with the dry germinating soil
and wet it by placing the seed tray in the
water filled wood tray. The sides of the
wood tray are high enough that I use a piece
of plastic that I cut from 2 X 4 sheet that
is used for florescent lighting. I've written
numbers on the piece of plastic that corresponds
to the cells for each of the different size
trays, 256 or 512. The only potential problem using the large
coat trays is that they dry out faster. I
solved this problem by designing large moisture
bins in a rack, pictured below. I built this out of PVC 1/2" pipe, one
4'x8' sheet of 1/2" plywood, six 1"x6"x6'
pieces of pine, two 1"x8"x6' pieces
of pine, and four florescent light fixtures.
There is a brace ( pine) in the back that
is screwed at a diagonal across the levels
for stability, the screws go from the inside
of the trays to the brace.  As you can see in the picture on the right
the plywood and is actually being held up
by the Tees. I put a bracket to help hold
everything in place, because nothing is glued.
This way I can take the unit apart when it
is not being used. If you build now make
sure that if you put the screws into the
pine that the tips or points of the screws
are not sticking through. This will not be
good for the plastic sheet put over this
in the next step. As you  can see I'm placing a 10"x20" heating
mat on the plywood and then placing the 4
mil plastic over this. I have found that
the best place (cheapest) to get the heating
mats from is IGC (International Greenhouse Company), they
have them for $21. Next I place a 4x8 sheet
of plastic egg crate material over the plastic sheet. I the picture below you will see that I put
a 4 foot piece of what is called plastic
plumbers tape. I nail this between the two
end pieces of pine, so that the cover will
not fall into my seedling when I want to
see what is going on inside.Now, fill this
with about 2 gallons of water, 4 standard
trays will fit in this with out the clear
domes or water trays under the sheet trays.
To keep in the moisture I place a cover over
this the light defusing plastic cover. All of the
building materials can be purchased at your
local lumber yard. The plastic light defusing
cover and plastic egg create can both be
found in the same department that sells serenaded
ceilings. After about a month  your plants will look like this on the right. In 3 weeks I haven't added
more water yet. To prevent dampening off
I spray my Impatiens with diluted mouth wash. |
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