Seed sowing and making Soil Blocks

Our host Toby Rosenberg has been a vegetable grower for many years and is currently setting up a small market 

garden, we are fortunate to learn and be shown his successes in seed raising in soil blocks at his property.

What are soil blocks used for?

To grow seeds into seedlings.

Why use them?

Seedlings being grown in soil blocks can be transplanted without causing a shock to the plants. They are just transferred into a hole in your garden bed instead of being pulled out of pots risking damage to their delicate root system before being transplanted.

Also, seedlings in soil blocks come without plastic pots, thus reducing environmental impacts, and have several other benefits we will cover in more detail in this course.

And most importantly, come along to share my joy of watching seeds having grown into tiny seedlings overnight (even the chucks join in every day).

Course topics

We will start with an exploration of the ingredients required to create the mix for making soil blocks. After creating that mix on site, we will make a few soil blocks of different sizes.

We will use these soil blocks to start seedlings for different vegetables, discussing the right size of soil blocks to be used, how to plant the seeds into them and why some of them should be covered with different materials whereas other seeds shall be left exposed.

An in-depth discussion will cover the various vegetable seeds which can be used in soil blocks and what one has to take care of in order to grow top-quality seedlings out of them.

Following up on this, we will discuss where to place the new soil blocks best, how to water them, and some of the most common mistakes being made which may result in losing the seedlings.
Each of you can take home three trays containing six soil blocks each. The seeds you planted in them can be transplanted into your garden later on.

How to transplant the finished seedlings into the garden will be shown with seedlings we have already grown, explaining the tools we use for doing so as well as covering basic questions about how to protect the seedlings.

Further course details
This course will include a light lunch, you will receive an email closer to the time with more details.