While mulling over this trouble, I came throughout a piece of writing at the Weekend Gardener internet magazine (unaffiliated, to this point as I understand, with the e-book through the identical name that I've defined somewhere else on this weblog as my gardening bible). The author, Hilary Rinaldi, says she might no longer trouble with the
This sounded like an appealing idea, but we puzzled over where to find a potting mixture that would meet her requirements. Neither bagged potting soil nor seed-starting mix seemed to fit the bill; the potting soil wasn't loose enough, and the seed-starting mix was lacking in nutrients. We could have tried making our own by buying compost, vermiculite, and peat moss separately and mixing them together, but some of these components are hard to find in stores, and even if we did, it would be a big and messy job. Then Brian got the idea that maybe the thing to do was to take the bagged soil and seed-starting mix we already had and simply combine them in a one-to-one ratio. The potting mix contains about half peat moss and half vermiculite, and the soil is just soil, so the two products together would give us the mix of materials that Rinaldi was recommending. And since we already had the ingredients, it would be a lot easier and cheaper than putting something together from scratch.
So this is our new plan: each time we start seedlings from now on, we'll start by mixing equal parts potting soil and seed-starting mix, moistening it, and loading it into the seed-starting tubes. Then the seeds will go straight into the tubes, and there they'll stay until it's time to put them in the ground. We'll test this mixture with both indoor seedlings grown under our grow light and seedlings that are winter sown (grown outdoors in miniature greenhouses made from plastic jugs) and see how it performs under different conditions.
Of course, it was too late to try this with the parsley seedlings we'd already started, so Brian compromised; he filled up a new set of tubes about two-thirds full with plain potting soil, then carefully removed the parsley seedlings, along with about a third of the seed-starting mix they were in, and popped that in right on top of the potting soil in the new tubes. So they'll now have seed-starting mix on top and more nourishing soil underneath, which we hope will allow them to draw up the nutrients they need from the soil as their roots spread. I'll keep you posted on how it goes with them and with other seeds grown according to our new method.
