How to use peat tablets for seedlings?

Spring comes, and together with it gardeners start planting seeds to grow seedlings. Some of them use homemade wooden boxes and pots, someone buys plastic containers. The standard and common place of their placement are the 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, which has to be tolerated before planting seedlings.

Modern achievements allow gardeners to use peat tablets for seedlings. They first appeared on the market of our country several years ago. However, very soon, lovers of the garden realized that this approach allows you to save a lot of space and get rid of unnecessary problems with the use of land. The tablet has the original dimensions - 2.5-3.5 cm and 8.5 cm in diameter.

Peat tablets for seedlings are high-quality extruded peat moss, which is given a special round shape. The acidity of such peat should be 5.5-6.0 pH. The tablets are placed in a special mesh so that they retain their original appearance and later can be easily immersed in the soil without harm to the plants. The advantage of such containers is also that they already contain the necessary minerals and other nutrients, without which the shoots will grow slower, and the seedlings will be weaker.

Another advantage is that the cultivation in peat pellets allows the oxygen of the air to freely penetrate through the pores available in the filler, which is very important for the development of the root system in seedlings.

Practical tips

First, let's look at how to use peat tablets for seedlings:
1) Pick up a suitable pallet and place on it a tablet, placing it in a groove upwards.
2) Pour pre-prepared standing water (50 ml) into the tablet, which should have a temperature of 20-22 ° C. The developers have planned to increase the initial height 5 times after watering (a volume of 0.8 liters is produced), and the diameter does not change . The resulting height is ideal if you are growing seedlings in peat pills.
3) Your "environmentally friendly" pot is ready, you just need to drain excess water.

Now proceed to the detailed instructions for sowing seeds in peat tablets for seedlings:
1) In the prepared tablet, place 1 or 2 seeds of the selected vegetable garden.
2) Seeds need to be covered with a small amount of humus.
3) Create a greenhouse effect inside the tablet, covering it with a polyethylene film.
4) Periodically remove the film so that the tablet does not dry out.
If you follow the instructions, you will see the shoots through the time indicated on the packaging of this culture.

The first sign that it is time to finish growing seedlings in peat pellets is the appearance of the plant's root system. Now you can safely transplant the seedlings in the soil of the greenhouse. There is no need to pull the plant out of the tablet body. You can immerse the plant with it. Later, the material giving the tablet form will dissolve, and a mixture of peat and humus will be an additional fertilizer for seedlings.

If you do not want to grow in peat tablets, since they can only be used once, then buy a coconut substrate that decomposes much more slowly and can therefore be used several times.

In our time, very few people use mixtures of their own making, because it is much easier to buy them in the 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.