by Curlydock
This is the start of my second attempt at seedling identification. This time I have a technique that should remove doubt about what sprouted.
Most of the unwanted volunteers from my previous effort turned out to be tomato seedlings. I fed a lot of tomatoes to the worms, so the seeds were still viable in the vermicompost.
I still want to keep the purported advantages of organic living soil so I still have not sterilized the potting medium. In fact, I am using the same pots I used before. This time, however, the seedling of interst is clearly flagged by a ring of newspaper around the seedling. Any sprout that is outside of that ring can be “weeded out”.
The ring of newspaper is the top rim of what I call a “tiny pot”. The tiny pots are made from 2-inch squares of newspaper wrapped around the end of a pencil. The small cylinder thus created stays intact when the end of it is crushed closed. The seeds are planted in the open end after the tiny pots are placed into the cells of an ice cube tray and moistened.
To get one and only one seed in each tiny pot, I used a bamboo skewer moistened on the end. Small seeds adhere to the sharp end and larger seeds will adhere to the blunt end. Don’t stick the moist skewer into your packet of seeds. The moisture on the skewer is probably not good there. Sprinkle a few seeds from your main pack into another container and pick the seeds from the other container with the wet skewer. The smallest seeds may be repelled instead of attracted to the skewer at first, but they will soon give up their static charge and stick to it.
The particular ice cube tray used was one with a five-by-twelve grid of cells. It makes very small round ice cubes. The tray is kept in a plastic shoe box with a lid to keep the tiny pots moist. I had to use a medicine dropper to remove excess moisture from the tiny pots. You want the tiny pots damp but not soggy. I would not have had to use the medicine dropper if I had drilled a small drainage hole in each of the ice cube tray cells.
The seeds are carfully selected and metered. Only one seed is planted per tiny pot. However, five seeds of the same type are plated in a row. That allows 12 different types of seed to be sprouted in one ice cube tray. Of the five seeds of one kind in any one row, only the largest or most vigorous sprout is selected to plant in the larger pots cotaining the medium of unsterilised vermicompost. The others are kept for a while in case the first one did not take.
The sprout, tiny pot and all, is moved from the ice cube tray cell and planted into the larger containter of potting medium. Do this as soon as it is obvious the seed has sprouted. Leave enough of the tiny pot visible so it will serve as a flag saying “this is the one you planted”. Pull up anything else that comes along.
The tiny pots should decay and return to the soil eventually. The piece of paper they are made from is so small that the decaying paper should not significantly deplete the fertility of the potting medium.
