These pictures from Gardenweb are pretty amazing… amazingly bad, that is! Poor plant!

Day 5 -- Veggies on the left, sprouts on the right

The veggie seedlings look really healthy and active. I planted them VERY shallowly (by accident) in the jiffy pots, to the point where I actually got to see roots emerge as tiny little fibers from the seed as it started to germinate.

See? Fuzzies!

Overall, with the veggies, things emerged at the same time (about three days after planting) in both the potting mix and the jiffy pots. It’s worth noting that the same wasn’t true for the initial batch of dirt — I was still waiting or tomato sprouts for 10 days! Where the jiffy pots are really far ahead is on the annuals. This is probably because the annual seeds are so tiny that they sat right on the surface. Hopefully I’ll get a good crop of verbena and violas, which I’ve had just no luck at all with.

Flower seedlings are germinating much faster in the jiffy pots.

In other news, I tried transplanting the extremely leggy lettuce and kohlrabi to slightly larger seed containers (actually, re-purposed gatorade bottles) because it didn’t seem to be growing in the seed trays anymore. This may have been an epic fail; I killed over half of the Kohlrabi seedlings in the process of moving them. Delicate things. I also transplanted the cucumbers and green beans into new pots because they’d gotten large enough to be rootbound. This weekend I’ll probably do the same with the first batch of tomato seedlings.

More on my re-purposed containers tomorrow…

So that you don’t end up like me, I’ve documented the CORRECT way to plant something with a Jiffy pod. First, wet it down. Note: I cut my tray of pods into 9 pod units because that’s how I keep track of seedling batches. I plant nine at a time, which makes a nice square tray that I only have to mark once and can remove from the humidity domes when the seeds in that tray have sprouted.

I've added about 2 cups of water to ths tray. Note the lack of seeds: Don't add seeds until later!

The formula that I found that worked was about 2 cups of water per 9 jiffy pots. Frankly, just keep adding water until they’re all inflated all the way. Here’s a picture of those same nine about a half hour later.

Pretty much inflated. There's still some dry area that could use more water, but they're soft enough to plant in now.

They’re a little shorter than your other trays. In other words, there’s less jiffy pot than you would have growing compound.

Short ... Packed. Also, note the seeds sticking out slightly. You can only push them in so far.

The biggest problem that I have with jiffy pots is that I like to bury my seeds. I think they grow better that way… especially things like peppers and tomatoes that require a nice deep burying. (And the sweetpeas that I love need to be buried an entire inch deep!) The fill is fairly dense and fibrous, though, so hopefully that counts for something.

It’ll be interesting to track when Batch 2 sprouts. Here’s a picture of the finished planting last night after 9 hours of soaking up water and rays. Note that you can see some of the seeds.

Batch 2, the sprout-off, after it's first evening watering. Note that you can see some of the seeds in the jiffy pots; they won't go deeper.

But wait — there’s more! I’m comparing and contrasting planting with regular seed starter mix and the “Jiffy Pot” little disk trays that you can buy at most nurseries and garden centers these days. They look like an interesting concept, but I can buy and fill three trays of seedlings for the cost of one tray of Jiffy Pots.

Old-skool: Seed Starter Mix

I’ve planted (and labeled) 72 more seeds — half of which are in the Jiffy Greenhouse (shown below) and half of which are in traditional nursery pods filled with seed starter mix.

The New Contender: The Jiffy Greenhouse

I’ll be tracking these just like I tracked my first one, and hope to actually track this run of seedlings all the way through their lifecycles until I hit the point where I select ones to plunk in the ground. If you see an annotation of “Batch 2″ with any of the veggies in the plant pages (which I’ve been slacking on…), that means it came out of this experiment. I hope to take a picture every day to show the differences in using the Jiffy Pots vs. the seed starter.