Indoor Seed Starting 2021

It’s finally starting to warm up in Georgia so it is time to get to work on my 2021 spring garden with indoor seed starting.

I decided to do things a little different this year when it comes to seed starting. I usually go with the seed trays that have the dirt pods in them but this year I decided to try out some with coconut coir instead. I found these at Amazon:

These kits come with a water tray, an insert that holds the 36 coconut coir fiber pods and a clear dome for the greenhouse effect. They also come with a wooden stick that you use to break up the pods, labels and a layout sheet so that you can mark what is in each pod.

After you open the kit and remove all of the components, you drizzle warm water over the coir pods so that they will expand. This process takes about 5 minutes. Then you can use the included wood stir stick to gently break up the pods and smooth them out.

Once they are expanded and smoothed out you can add the seeds to each pod.

For my first test I intended to plant tomato seeds. I normally use heirloom seeds but I discovered that I did not have any ready to use when I was preparing this tray. I did find an old pack of Better Boy Hybrid Tomato seeds in my freezer. I had forgotten about this pack of seeds and only discovered it when my refrigerator died and I had to clean everything out. This pack of seeds has been in the freezer since 2013!

The package said it had 12 seeds in it but when I opened it I discovered 19 usable seeds and 2 that were crushed. I’m not sure if those 2 got damaged in my freezer or in the shipping process back in 2013 before I bought them at Walmart. I decided to plant all 19 seeds and see how many, if any, would actually sprout.

It will be interesting to see how these seeds respond since they have been in the freezer for so long. I haven’t ever tried seeds that have been frozen for that amount of time. The oldest “frozen” seeds I’ve ever used were 2 years old and they did just fine.

I’ll update this once I see any seeds sprout (fingers crossed).

Click here to see the results after 7 days.