This part of the 2026 gardening work started actually in 2025, a few days before Christmas. And not only is it the first gardening work of the season, it is also the first experiment.
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I found this idea on YouTube last year, unfortunately, after I had already started all my small-seed plants. But since I decided to have one more try at growing my own onions from seeds, I also decided to try out this idea. It is, in principle, very simple. First, wet planting substrate is put in a roll of some sort of rot-resistant material (people were using bubble-wrap, mirelon, or other plastics). I am using old black landscaping cloth. The rolls are then bound together with a string or with a container and sprinkled with seeds on the top.
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I switched my yoghurt-buying to big, 1 l buckets, because I have enough of the 500 ml ones and I need the bigger ones too. And their first use this season is to contain the seed snails.
I am trying three varieties, one red, one yellow, and one shallot, and I marked them with popsicle sticks to keep track of which is which. The shallot packet had really few seeds, barely enough for one snail, whereas both the red (č=červená) and yellow (ž=žlutá) had each enough for three.
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Everything sprouted nicely so far. After about one month, I will probably try to move these into even bigger pots, or possibly split each snail into two pots.
The idea of sowing small seeds into seed snails is that when the snail is unrolled, one gets a row of tiny plants that is much easier to separate than the tangled mess one gets when simply sowing them in a container. It should be especially easy on the roots. I will also try it for the initial sowing of tomatoes, and maybe even other plants with tiny seeds, yet to be determined.
That’s a compelling idea, thanks for sharing this. I will definitely try this, probably also with onions. Until now I have never succeeded with growing them from seed, so last year I have been using small seeding onions instead. This was better, but because of the very dry and hot weather most of them did not grow very big, so I didn’t bother and just left the small ones in the earth. By Christmas they had sprouted lovely and sturdy new shoots so I put on a thick layer of earth and leaves to try to get them over the winter.
Oh, that is an interesting idea! I start leeks from seed every year just by sowing them into pots, and separating the seedlings for planting out is always a pain.