The Perks of using Mini Soil Blocks

Using a tool called a mini soil blocker, you can create 3/4 inch cubes of peat moss, sow a single small seed per block, and transplant at germination with little or no transplant shock. Give every seed a chance to grow. Ideal for small vegetable and flower seeds the size of lettuce, basil, or strawberry seeds.

Pressing the Blocks

This is a mini soil blocker. You press out twenty 3/4 inch blocks at a time. For most seeds (those seeds germinating in one week or less), I mix peat moss with warm water until it resembles cottage cheese. Press the soil blocker into the peat moss and twist to make sure all cubes are filled. Lift up, level off the peat moss with a trowel, then press into a container. The blocks will retain their shape until transplanted when watered from the bottom of the container.

Organizing the Blocks

I find that a half-gallon milk carton cut lengthwise is a perfect container for the mini blocks. This half-carton will hold a total of 40 blocks, 20 blocks at either end. Other containers would work well too.

Planting Your Seeds

To sow one seed per block, use a toothpick dipped in water. Pick up a single seed and press it firmly onto the top of the soil block if the seed needs light to germinate, or press it into the soil block if it needs darkness to germinate. Be sure to label your seeds.

Keeping your Blocks Moist

Ensure that the soil blocks remain moist. If using a half-gallon milk carton, you can enclose the entire carton in a one-gallon clear plastic bag with a twist tie. Place under grow lights or on a windowsill out of the sunshine. Check the soil blocks twice a day to make sure they are neither too dry nor too moist. Water from the bottom. Remove the plastic when the seeds germinate.

Nurturing Your Seeds

Depending on the seeds, a heating mat may be used to enhance germination. A windowsill heating mat is large enough for two half-gallon milk cartons, for a total of 80 soil blocks. Remove the cartons from the heating mat once they germinate, and place another two half-cartons on the heating mat.

When to Transplant your Seedlings

Once the seeds germinate, you can immediately transplant them. Hold the sides of the cube, being careful of the root.

How to Transplant your Seedlings

You can transplant into 6-packs to grow on for awhile, until you transplant them into larger pots or directly into the garden.

Enjoy!

Enjoy your harvest!

My name is Diane O’Neill and I garden in Seattle, Washington. In addition to my vegetable and flower gardens at home, I have a plot at a neighborhood community garden where I lead the effort to produce food to donate to local food banks. Two gardening authors that have changed the way I garden are Eliot Coleman, The New Organic Grower (where I first learned about soil blocks) and Mel Bartholomew, All New Square Foot Gardener.

When you look at the garden photo above you might be reminded of your own garden, or more likely reminded of the fact that you need to do some serious work in your garden to get it looking like that. However, this part of the tutorial is not meant to embellish the perfect garden space and design that many of us don’t have. What I am envisioning is how your garden space, containers, and design–as it evolves–can be an incredible environment of food, community sharing and just plain good beauty. There are plenty of tutorials about your physical construction of garden space. What my tutorial is all about is enhancing the dirt you start with. So, I assume you have a location, some containment, and some dirt–not difficult PHD rocket science skills. So, read up on basic 101 wormology or better known as Vermiculture.

In the common dirt that you’ll start with from your yard, you’ll find a few worms for sure. If you are buying topsoil, you may or may not get gobs of worms. Either way, locate a worm supplier or recolonize your property worms to your garden space. From here on, we are thinking that we need many worms, more worms and lots of worms. Your garden soil isn’t just dirt. It’s becoming a warehouse of composting, worm enhancement and selective soil additives. Be careful about the virgin dirt that you use. Sometimes dirt or even commercial topsoil is contaminated. There aren’t any clever little tests to catch the ‘dirty’ dirt but ask about its history. etc. You can mix non decomposing soils to your dirt little by little, such as some sand, some peat moss, sometimes cat litter. BUT never mix gobs of it–just small amounts. This will help prevent your soil from getting a hardness to it.

Worms lay eggs AND Worms like to lay their eggs in eggshells. As you have set up your dirt soil base, got your worms and you’re nurturing your new starts, be thinking about the space between your plants, your rows or however you distribute your garden growth. This is where you need to gently spade in your eggshells. You do this with a shallow diffing–no more than a few inches. If you haven’t established a good spread on the worms, keep depositing them as the days go by. Compost in some food leftovers, like greens coffee grounds, other vegetable mater. In time, you’ll be in for an amazing discovery when you gently open one of the shell layers and see small white spots: WORM EGGS!!! Each worm will lay anywhere from a few to as many as 20 eggs. And since you will have thousands of worms imported at the beginning and be the neighborhood hunter of everyone’s eggshells, you will have a marvelous kingdom of soil composting and worms. Think of it this way: you now no longer have just ‘plain, old boring’ dirt–you have a thriving community of soil growth and fertility that is feeding your plants. That’s the next science.

There’s a certain place in the maturing garden when your routine watering, weeding, and insect monitoring all comes together–hopefully. Plant your crops so that you always have something ready to harvest early and others staggered out later. It doesn’t always work that way but experiment with it. Your other garden buddies and online tutoring will help. NOW, let’s get back to the worms. The ideal humus soil–that top 3″ or 4 ” of soft, rich dirt will be loaded with worm castings, worms, some fungi, some bacteria, some etc. The worm castings are the waste products of the worms, like worm poop. But these castings are providentially designed to have the exact kinds of nutrient chemicals that plants need form their BEST growth. So, if you keep populating and spreading your worm community, you’ll get more diverse movement of them. And as you keep composting with some new soils, some eggshells and coffee grounds, some other composting food wastes, your soil volume will increase. Each year you’ll have more. Each year, you’ll be ahead of the difficult start of the garden. And–what I like to do–is be able to share my surplus soils and worms with my community. Vermiculture is my hobby. For some, it may be a profession. For some a science. But for you, I hope it is a blessing to your fruitful garden world.

I am a retired teacher, specialized in the broad spectrum of preschool to 12th grade instruction. In an almost ironic sense, I am more rehired into the community than I was as a “hired” teacher. Retirement is a wonderful activity. I have a Botany and Chemistry degree also; that has been my main secondary resource in all of my teaching. I have an active engagement in community gardens, in teaching at a local arboretum as a certified naturalist, and in advocating for redefined box gardens in family or community settings.