Gardening: A new seed-starting hack
The last weekend of February, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Northwest Flower and Garden Festival in downtown Seattle.
Traveling over Snoqualmie Pass was uneventful courtesy of our dry winter and seeing the early spring green lifted my spirits.
The NWFGF is one of the country’s largest annual gardens shows and features display gardens, a huge market for anything related to gardening that I always check out for unusual plants I can’t find in Spokane. The show also hosts dozens of talks, workshops and demonstrations featuring gardening and horticultural experts from around the country and the world. All for the price of the entrance ticket.
One of my favorite talks this year was on innovative ways to start seeds for spring sowing. I was familiar with what’s called winter sowing but not with planting seed snails.
In winter sowing, a plastic milk jug is cut in half leaving the handle as a hinge and holes are punched in the bottom for drainage. The bottom of the jug is filled with potting soil and planted with cold tolerant seeds and watered. The top is taped closed and the cap removed to allow rain to water the plants.
The jug is set out in a protected but bright spot in the garden and allowed to germinate and begin growing. When the seedlings are big enough and the weather is right, plant them out in the garden.
A seed snail is just that, a spiral wrapped strip of the thin polywrap that often comes in our mail order packages and filled with soil with the seeds planted in the soil spiral. The pieces of polywrap are cut about 6 inches wide and up to 18 inches long. The polywrap is completely surfaced with about an inch of damp potting soil. The wrap and the soil are then tightly rolled to form a spiral that resembles a snail and taped shut with packing or duct tape.
The snail is set upright and the top topped off with more soil and gently packed down to make it level. The seeds are thickly planted around the snail according to the package depth recommendations. It’s best to plant only one kind of seed to a snail to make it easier to manage at planting time. Use a felt marker to note what was planted in the snail.
The spirals are set upright in a leak-proof container like a cottage cheese carton or a planting flat to keep them upright and allow them to be watered from the bottom. Top the snails loosely with plastic wrap, watered and set under growing lights set for 12 to 14 hours a day.
Once the seeds sprout, the plastic wrap is removed. Check regularly for watering needs, but don’t let water stand in the container for more than a couple of hours. Thin out weaker seedlings.
When it’s time to plant, simply unroll the snail and gently tease out the seedlings for planting.