Seed Starting Mix!

Hey Les,

I live closer to a little town named Dennison where I located one through a google search. Dallas has quite few which surprised me. I really didn't realize that many people are into hydroponics.

Thanks

Ted

[RinTinTin]

If you are looking for coco coir, check out these people. They sell 5 gallon grow-bags with enough (expandable) coir to fill them for under $3.

They are in Colorado, so be certain to see how much shipping will be before ordering. Their price for 5 gal compares with what the local garden stores charge for enough to fill a couple 8" pots!

Hydro-Gardens

[dice]

[worm castings as seed-starting fertilizer]

One thing to watch out for when mixing worm castings
into seed-starting mix of any kind is volunteers. If you
have been putting tomato and pepper debris, seeds and
all, into your worm bin, and you then mix those worm
castings into seed-starting mix, you may have plants of
unknown cultivars coming up with your carefully labeled
seedlings.

One way around this is to bag up the worm castings, bring
them indoors into a room where it is warm enough for any
viable seeds in the worm castings to sprout, spread them
out in shallow flats of some kind, and water them. If you
are a month or two ahead of when you start seeds, any
seeds in the worm castings should sprout, allowing you to
pick them out of the worm castings before mixing the worm
castings into seed-starting mix.

(I have taken to separating the kitchen scrap into "with seeds"
and "without seeds" in different containers, and dumping the
"with seeds" stuff into the center of a compost pile instead of
putting them in the worm bin. The heat from the compost
will deactivate a lot of those seeds, and volunteers are a lot
easier to identify coming up around foot tall seedlings in the
ground or in containers than coming up with other seeds of
the same plant in seed-starting mix.)

[KLorentz]

Boy I wish I could find a local source. But shipping for two of these was not to bad from this source. I have not been able to order but these folks seem to be the most reasonable.


http://www.greenhousemegastore.com/p...growing-medium


Kevin

[dice]

I don't know what shipping usually runs from Home Harvest,
but they do have some quality products:
http://homeharvest.com/pottingmixes.htm
(2.8 cu ft of Metromix 360 w/coir for $22 plus shipping, for
example)

Peaceful Valley has this stuff:
http://www.groworganic.com/growing-s...quickroot.html
Shipping for 1 cu ft runs about $12, so a little over $20 for
1 cu ft shipped. 2 bags runs about $35 shipped for 2 cu ft.

Shipping on these bulky items seems to double the price or
more.

[dice]

[coir and pH]
I got a block of Beats Peat for seed-starting this year:
http://indoorgardensupplies.com/beat...12c9504da4ecd0

(I actually got it from Peaceful Valley, but their website is
a bit slow at the moment. I was ordering something else
anyway, so shipping was mostly already paid for. It was
$8.99. Hydroponic stores would probably have it or an
equivalent, though it might be a little higher priced off
the shelf.)

I tested the pH, it was 6.6, just about perfect for tomatoes
(so a real 6.7 using my particular pH tester). No pH adjustment
needed.

It does take awhile for those compressed blocks to expand.
A "3 cu. ft." block of Beats Peat comes as 4 inch-thick wafers.
I would break one up into little pieces, put it in a 5-gallon bucket,
fill it a little more than halfway with water and let it set for a
few days, then spread it out in cat litter tubs to dry out a bit
while another wafer expanded in the bucket. Then bagged it
for later use. I expect that the coir in the bags will still be moist
when it comes time to start seeds in a couple of months.

edit:
It does not really look like 3 cubic feet at this point,
more like 1.8-2 cubic feet (about 12 gallons). It may
still expand more in the bags (some of it may be wet
but still slightly compressed, etc). I would really prefer
to buy it loose, to compare price per usable volume
with bagged seed-starting mix, but it would cost more
to ship that way.

[Stepheninky]

If you are like me and live in a place that you would have to order the pro-mix etc. here is what I do and it works really well. Go buy a bag of miracle grow potting mix, buy a cheap plastic colander (like you drain pasta with) Take a cup or two of the miracle grow and put it in the colander over a container and give it a good shaking. Discard any big bits left in the colander. Repeat in till you have the desired amount of seeding mix. Thats what I do and I have no problems sprouting out seeds. Its fairly cheap as well.

[organichris]

I've never used a seed starting mix. The one time I had success starting plants indoors I used a mix of peat moss and humus-rich topsoil. However, that can be messy and might create other problems eventually.

I'm looking for a mix, but I'm concerned about whether it will have sufficient nutrients to support plant growth, and anything with added chemical fertilizers is out of the question since I'm hardcore, anal-retentive, organic. Assuming I can find something without chemicals, I would assume it would be necessary to fertilize with compost tea or something at later stages of growth. I just don't know.

[lemurian]

Originally Posted by organichris

I'm looking for a mix, but I'm concerned about whether it will have sufficient nutrients to support plant growth, and anything with added chemical fertilizers is out of the question since I'm hardcore, anal-retentive, organic. Assuming I can find something without chemicals, I would assume it would be necessary to fertilize with compost tea or something at later stages of growth. I just don't know.

I would recommend FoxFarm's starting mix, then. It's called Light Warrior, I think, and I used it last year with really good results. It's looks a bit like sticks and twigs and clods, but germination times were no different than with the super-fine peat moss stuff. It's full of organic nutrients like worm castings, bat guano, etc. I really liked it, however the shipping is ridiculous. It does not weigh even close to what your average bag of soil weighs, but I got charged an arm and a leg for shipping from Peaceful Valley. So shop around!

Gardener's Supply has an organic seed starting mix with compost that I ordered a bag of this year. Shipping was free, so I thought it'd be worth a try.

[dice]

Coir is a lot like peat: good texture, good air space, holds
water even better, soaks up water better, but with close
to zero nutritional value.

I have a worm bin, so mixing 1/6-1/4 worm castings in for
potting up from seed-starting cells into 4" pots or newspaper
pots or similar provides organic, non-burning fertilizer. In the
past, I have added a pinch of guano and a pinch of kelp meal
to each 4" pot and watered with 1/4 strength fish fertilizer;
made a tea of earthworm castings (room temperature water)
and watered with that; made a tea of comfrey, chickweed,
alfalfa, nettles, and kelp (hot tap water, cooled to room
temperature after sitting overnight) to water seedlings with;
watered with teaspoon per gallon molasses; put a couple of
handfuls of green clover leaves in a blender, added water,
liquified the clover, and watered with that; and so on.

There are lots of ways to make mild organic fertilizer for
seedlings. I bet simply making regular tea, the kind that
people drink, letting it cool, and watering with that would
work. Coffee might have some effect on pH in the seedling
mix (have to try it and test after), but houseplants that I have
poured a cup of cold black coffee into always seemed to react
positively.

[ireilly]

I put grounds and old coffee in the compost pile always.

Here's some reading. I liked the fact that the EPA is giving recommendations on gardening now. :-) Still looking for an analysis of the beverage coffee itself, not just grounds.

http://www.donnan.com/coffee-on-plants.htm

http://www.sunset.com/garden/earth-f...0400000016986/

The last one has a comment from "Al" that is interesting about the liquid fractions.

[dice]

Those links are interesting. The houseplants that I poured cups
of coffee into would have already been root-bound, so any
inhibition of rooting from the caffeine would have been a
non-issue for them. That might not be the case with seedlings,
however.

With tea, one might want to make tea from already used
teabags or tea grounds to water seedlings with (most of
the caffeine would have been gone already from the first
use). An overnight soak in weak tea is sometimes cited as
a method to wake up old seeds that are difficult to get to
sprout.