Free seed planting, graph paper for common plug or cell flats.

Spring planting season is passing quickly, but, you may be in luck, if you have been dragging your feet like me. I tend to plant a lot of different seeds in a single flat. The common flat has 72 holes or cells. I rarely plant 72 of the same thing with the exception of maybe flowers that I want to plant in mass. For seeds like peppers and tomatoes, I plant about 4 times as much as I think I might need. This leaves me insurance for germination failures and many to give away to family and friends. This is still usually less than 10 seeds of each variety.

In the past, I have used popsicle sticks from any craft store to mark the seed locations. Since I didn’t like adding 72 sticks, I would mark the upper right cell of a group of cells. This worked fine but was still a lot of work. The popsicle sticks also were tall enough that they would hit my lights. This year I am taking a different tact.

I have created three pdf documents for the three different plug flats that I have purchased for this season. 72 is the common size, but I also have 50 cell and 128 cell documents. Why the different sizes? Simply, different sizes of plants benefit from different sizes of cells. Small slow growing plants like onions and leeks do well in the 128 cell, and large extremely fast growing plants like melons, cucumbers do well in the 50 cell flats.

The documents have circles in a grid representing each cell in the flat. There is also a notes section at the bottom. In use, I mark the front of my flats with a number for identification and a reference for which edge of the flat corresponds to the top or bottom of the cell graph document. I then just enter the number in the notes section on my sheet. I also give all of the seeds for each season a unique number. I can enter this number in the cells, beside a row, or under a column if I am planting multiple seeds.

Hope these are helpful. Please comment if you want different cell counts or have ideas on how to improve the document layout.

72 cell
50 cell
128 cell