Floret’s Seed Starting Soil
If you’re an avid flower grower, even just for hobbies, you’ll recognize the name Floret. If you don’t, you really need to check them out...they’re a small family flower farm and zinnia breeder in Skagit Valley and are the bible by which I grow flowers!
Erin recently released a seed starting soil experiment where they used three different types of soil to grow seedlings; one with just Promix soil, one with Promix + fertilizer, and one that has a mashup of compost, bone meal, kelp meal, and blood meal, among other things. The recipe they created is on the larger scale for what I need, so I spent some time downsizing it for the amount of soil I wanted to start seeds in. You can get the recipe simply by signing up with your email, it’ll show up in your inbox.
Since I didn’t use Promix and didn’t have compost, I came up with a mixture of peat moss, coco coir, perlite, vermiculite and worm castings, then added in the remainder of the ingredients. While their blog post shows the incredible results, sometimes you can’t help but question if the benefits are truly what they show. In this case - I can confirm - their seed starting soil is 100% worth it and does work.
Before Floret released their recipe, I started some seedlings in a mixture of worm castings, vermiculite, perlite, and peat moss. Once they released their recipe, I ordered the remaining ingredients and threw together some of their soil. I started some new seeds in that soil as well as potted up some of my already started seedlings into that soil, and the results were incredible.
These are carnation seedlings that were all started at the same time in my original soil mixture, and then I potted up three of them into Floret’s seed starting mix. I’ll let the results speak for themselves! You can see in the first photo below, the three seedlings that were re-potted in the soil. Eventually those three got potted up into larger containers of Floret’s soil, and took off.
I didn’t pot up all of the seedlings, and probably should have, but the seedlings in the above two photos are the same age as the three that got potted up into Floret’s soil. If you haven’t given it a try, you certainly should. Below is the individual ingredients I used, the majority of which can be found at your local Home Depot, Lowes, or even Walmart. The coco coir I purchased from a specialty garden center near me several years ago and it’s still going strong. Click on the images below for links to the different products.
