stevethelizard, lighten up. You environment activist need to start your own forum & stop being rude to persons who want to grow organic gardens. I have used organic gardening & organic gardening books for over 30 years & NO where have I seen or read that I have to be an environmentalist to be an organic gardener. Sure there are a lot of environmentalist who are organic gardeners, & they are welcome until they preach from the religious platform that we ALL have to be like them. The polar bear are going better today, then they have in 30 years, world wide. No matter what Mr. SUV Gore said on his little movie. This is America & we are each free to be organic gardeners, even if we do not drive electric car or have solar power plants on our roofs.The way I see it, if you do not have those thing you are a hypocrite & should get your house in order first. And if you do, then you still do not have the right to jump on other poster for using peat. Peat which is protected & in very large amounts over a good part of the world. And did not you change from "Global Warming" to "Climate Chance", when your research proved that the earth is not warming up as doom day has been saying .Is it not a fact that from 2006 until now the heat of summer has been dropping, not going higher as All of you claimed 1995-2010? This is the wrong forum for this , when your start the Environment Forum, we can debate this. To everyone else, I am sorry, I will compost my soap box now.

I used pretty much everything this year,my first.Peat pods were terrible.Germination was less than 20% in the 720 cells I did.Most had one or two for weeks, then I took them apart,hate the mesh on the outside.Broke up the pods mix with small amount of soil and covered.Most got a few more sprouts, but there still out there.I did pack some pods with soil around them in early april, did'nt seem to help. Did maybe 50 in peat pots in zipplocks, germ was good.But I don't like the head room issue or the fact that snow, heavy rain and wind battle me to keep them upright and uncrushed.Milk jugs had good germ too, but..When I have only one or two big sprouts taking the top off slows the rest of the seeds in the jug.I did alot of taking out large seedlings to reclose jugs for possible later sprouters.My fav has been the 4 stage clear tub set up.I just love this one.I have been trasfering my system to this since I started it.One tub sown seeds in clear plastic cups with bottems cut off, covered all the time.One tub for new sprouts,little holes in cover.One tub for large sprouts, cover off days, on nights.Last tub several true leaves, light fertilized waiting to be planted.Then I plant the seedling in/with the cup around it for protection.Doesn't disturb the roots, just press soil into garden hole while still in cup.When the babies are big enought I just twist the cup and remove. Storing cups and tubs should be easy, rise and reuse. now if I can just get a good labeling system down.......

I've been using peat pellets (Jiffy pellets) for two seasons now, but last year, I noticed some of the plants never really grew enough through the netting around the peat, and they just pulled out of the ground too easy even after a month or two. This year, I carefully peeled the netting off (or just peeled it down and left it attached to the bottom if too many roots grew through the bottom). I think that worked much better. The netting got fragile enough that it peeled off easily and didn't seem to break off small root tips growing through the sides. I'll probably keep using them in that manner. One thing I HAVE TO remember when using peat as a growing medium, though: I tend to leave the seedlings in it for too long and they don't grow much once they've put out their first true leaves. Peat is nice for moisture retention and for its fine texture for planting seeds, but it doesn't have much (or maybe any) nutrition for the young plants. I just finally potted some Japanese maple seedlings that have been sitting in six packs of peat for three months (I've been busy!), and they didn't grown ONE INCH after getting their first real leaves. I'm glad they didn't die while waiting for me to put them in some real potting soil. With all the flowers I grew from seed this year, none of them really started growing until I potted them up into 4" pots with a potting soil.

They're ok to begin with, but they dry out extremly fast as the plant gets larger. Also, they don't provide much room for roots as the plants grow and that means more work to transplant them when they only have a couple of leaves. And, it's a good idea to remove the outer webbing when you do transplant so the roots can grow freely. I use 8-10 ounce styrofoam cups filled with a potting medium to grow my plants in. They are big enough to easily grow a seedling to 8-10 inches tall (I've grown them larger), and the cups are cheap (80 for a dollar @ the discount store). The cups are large enough to allow good root growth, and, because of their size, you don't have to water them two or three times a day. When you get ready to plant just pull the plant out of the cup and put it in the soil. Alan