As temperatures warm up in the Northern Hemisphere, one’s mind naturally turns to the outdoors and the garden — even if some of our gardens are still snow-covered. One secret to good gardening is that many of the plants we love take too long to grow if started from seed outside, at least in relatively temperate climes. There are a myriad of ways to grow seedlings indoors, and this new hack highlighted by [GrowVeg] looks like a great way to get started.
The idea apparently comes from the seedier side of Instagram, where [Farida Sober] has been popularizing it as a “seed snail”, a name they seem to have coined. The technique is very simple: take a sheet of something cheap that won’t disintegrate when moist like bubble wrap or cardboard, layer it with soil — up to 5 cm depending on your seed size — and you roll the whole thing up like a piece of sushi to produce the spiral shape that gives the hack its name. With a piece of tape to hold the roll, it’s just a matter of planting your seeds according to the packet directions. If that’s clear as mud, check out the video embedded below.
Once the seedlings have grown, it looks like it will be very easy to unroll the spiral and pluck them out to plant in the ground or bigger pots without overly traumatizing their roots, like we always do starting in flats. If it weren’t for those delicate roots, it certainly looks like the snail might save some space compared to, say, peat pots. Just remember that starting under the proper LEDs can make a huge difference to how quickly your seeds grow. No dirt? No problem — once sprouted, your plants can be made to grow hydroponically. For the really adventurous, there’s even aeroponics.
Not true. You want many snails eating dead plant material and you want snails that eat other snails.
I must be missing something from this description because I don’t see the advantage over a traditional seedling tray, which probably requires less effort to set up and to transfer to pots.
I guess it’s cheaper since it’s made of trash? I applaud reuse.
And maybe it’s nice to have a circular layout since grow lights often have a circular cone of light?
Seed spirals give you more plants in the same space as a traditional seedling tray, prevent root entanglement between seedlings, and allows for quick and easy transplanting when the time comes. Once you get your own technique down they dont take any extra time nor add any extra effort compared to a comparable number of seed sites using trays.
PS most modern grow lights are using rectangular projection fields now.
It’s all about the roots. Seed trays end up with fairly short roots, tangled to the neighbours. As they have a lot of surface area, they dry out easily.
I buy seedlings that come in a spiral of newspaper like this, and they are twice the price, but 10x more reliable than the small shallow seed tray seedings, as they can be planted without any root damage, and they never seem to dry out in the store.
Slugs and snails? Don’t salt ’em, spray with liquid non sudsy household ammonia. Salt ruins soil, ammonia is fertilizer just don’t spray on plants. I’ve seen ’em slime out of a good salting but ammonia works one shot. It all goes back into the soil.
If you see them, a pointy stick gets the job done. No chemicals required.
I use crushed eggshells and beer-traps.
I don’t see how this disturbs the roots less than taking the contents of an entire starter puck/micropot and putting it into a new, larger vessel – or the ground, for that matter.
The only advantage I see is that around here, for some reason, squirrels go crazy on those little pucks. Eliminating those would help.
Snails encourage long straight root formation. Shallow trays encourage coiled tangled roots that lead some plants to becoming rootbound even when transplanted to larger containers or ground.
Next because the snail is uncoiled during transplanting roots arent subjected to stress and damage in the same way that happens when you pull a plantlet from a seedtray.
And finally its just more efficient packing a larger number of plantlets into a smaller space with less soilmix. Might not matter if youre only planting a small microbed in your windowsill or yard but when your planting an entire greenhouse its a huge difference.
Dang it, this post got put in the wrong place :/ Sorry!
I use bog roll cardboard insides. Cut them in half and put in a seed tray, fill with soil, then drop your seeds in each mini compartment. The rolls are easily separated and disintegrate by the time you need to plant outside.