Spring comes, and with it, gardeners begin to plant seeds for growing seedlings. Some of them use home-made wooden boxes and pots, someone buys plastic containers. The standard and common place for their placement is window sills and any free shelves in the house, since the capacity of the window sill is usually not enough. Of course, this creates a lot of inconvenience that you have to endure before planting seedlings.
Modern advances allow gardeners to use peat tablets for seedlings. They first appeared on the market of our country several years ago. However, very soon, gardeners realized that this approach saves a lot of space and eliminates unnecessary problems with the use of land. The tablet has an initial size of 2.5-3.5 cm and 8.5 cm in diameter.
Peat seedling tablets are high-quality pressed peat, which is given a special round shape. The acidity of such peat should be 5.5-6.0 in pH. Tablets are placed in a special grid so that they retain their original appearance and can later be easily immersed in soil without harm to plants. The advantage of such containers is also that they already contain the necessary minerals and other nutrients, without which the seedlings will grow more slowly, and the seedlings will be weaker.
Another advantage is that growing in peat pellets allows air oxygen to penetrate freely through the pores in the filler, which is very important for the development of the root system in seedlings.
Practical tips
To begin, consider how to use peat tablets for seedlings:
1) Choose a suitable tray and place the tablet on it, placing it with the recess up.
2) Pour pre-prepared defended water (50 ml) into the tablet, which should have a temperature of 20-22 . . The resulting height is ideal if you will be growing seedlings in peat tablets.
3) Your "environmentally friendly" pot is ready, you just need to drain the excess water.
Now we turn to the detailed instructions for sowing seeds in peat pellets for seedlings:
1) In a prepared tablet, place 1 or 2 seeds of a selected garden plant.
2) Seeds must be covered with a small amount of humus.
3) Create a greenhouse effect inside the tablet by covering it on top with plastic wrap.
4) Periodically remove the film so that the tablet does not dry out.
If you follow the instructions, you will see shoots at the time indicated on the packaging of this crop.
The first sign that it is time to finish growing seedlings in peat tablets is the appearance of the root system of the plant. Now you can safely transplant seedlings into the soil of the greenhouse. There is no need to pull the plant out of the pill body. You can immerse the plant with it. Subsequently, the material that gives the tablet a form will dissolve, and a mixture of peat and humus will become an additional fertilizer for seedlings.
If you do not want to grow in peat tablets, because they can be used only once, then buy a coconut substrate, which decomposes much more slowly and therefore can be used several times.
Nowadays, few people use mixtures of their own production, because it is much easier to buy them in an already fertilized and prepared form. And yet, among such a variety of ready-made mixtures, many experienced gardeners give preference to well-proven peat tablets.