Soil Blocks & Our New Laundry Line

Belle made it home safely from Washington yesterday. Hooray! I can blog again! Yesterday I finally took the plunge. I made soil blocks. I bought a soil blocker last year. It cost 35 bucks, but we didn't use it. It was our first year growing indoor seedlings, and making blocks was just to daunting. But there it sat, brand new, unused. What a waste. This year we thought, let's at least try it. Other gardeners like Daphne made is seem so easy; and Robin was trying it for the first time this year. So we tried it. I was astonished at how easy, fast, and efficient it was. Even little C. James was able to do it, as he said, "all by myself papa"! We'll probably use blocks for all our seeds this year. Here's a few pics.

 I screen the soil through a quarter inch screen.

Our formula is taken from Mini Farming Self-Sufficiency on a Quarter Acre by Brett Markham:

30% compost soil
30% garden soil
30% peat moss
10% fine sand

Soil mixture and water

2 inch square soil blocks

It's easy as pie, I don't know what I was afraid of!

1 5 gallon bucket of screened soil made 99 blocks. We planted onion seeds: 

27 Aussie Brown from Malay-Kadazan girl, thanks MKg. I hope we have success!

36 Borrettana Cipollini

36 New York Early from Fedco  

While I'm thinking about it, thank you Daphne for mentioning the idea of covering the seeds with vermiculite instead of soil. I just used a cup to pour the vermiculite into each tiny hole. It made things go very quickly.

Oh yea, the new laundry line on a pulley, we love it! It's high in the sky so the kids can't reach the clothes. It's connected directly to our deck, so we don't have to go far to use it in the winter and it's 50 feet long to hold lots of clothes.