I'm not a great seed-starter. I don't have a good instinct for how much moisture to maintain, how long to give them to germinate, when to harden off seedlings, etc. So every year I try to sharpen my skills just a little bit, learn something new, advance even if by a tiny smidgen.
Last year, my experiment was with homemade seed tape. That didn't go so well.
This year, I'm trying to start seeds indoors in an egg carton. I used a box-cutter to slice an "x" into the bottom of each cup for drainage. I then moistened some soilless seed mix and stuck in cucumber, acorn squash, zucchini, and kambucha squash seeds (the latter being seeds I'd saved from a particularly delicious dinner we had last fall).
Two things about egg cartons as seed starters - 1) You can cut out the bottoms and plant the whole cup when the seedling is ready to transplant! The carton will compost into the soil. 2) The dividers that keep eggs from bumping into each other make handy ways to label which seed is where!
I placed the carton (shown below before I moistened and covered) on a plastic tray in a sunny window, and covered it tightly with plastic wrap. Now it's "wait and see" time!
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