Soil Blocker

[Snoop Puss]

Onions I was lead to believe minimum disruption to roots to get a good crop.... Hence this thread.

For washing bowl - I read a bowl with 100mm deep compost ?

I grow some onions from seed and buy seedlings in as well. The seedlings come maybe three or four to a module that's maybe 1.5 cm square. So I have to pull them apart and sometimes it takes quite a bit of effort. Some of the seedlings end up with no soil on them or even lose a bit of root during the process. Out of maybe 150 seedlings, I rarely get a failure. A washing-up bowl or ice cream tub should do fine. And yes, maybe 10 cm or so of compost. Will save you a load of compost and effort.

Here, onion seedlings are sold when they have two leaves, you rarely find them with more than that. And they transfer very well. Perhaps the root disturbance is less important if they don't have so many leaves to support. I make sure they get well watered in to ensure they don't go thirsty. Just in case you're wondering, conditions are not all that fantastic here when they go out. It's often still very cold (they might get caught by frost) and possibly quite wet. If it's a warm day, I plant them out late in the afternoon. In my experience, onions are quite hardy and very forgiving.

Good luck.

[rary]

Just came on to this thread, 4shoes I have a soil blocker and have used it for onions and using the 2 stage blocks sowed in the small ones and transferred into the larger ones, I put the small blocks into a tray but when transferred into the larger ones they are sitting on a bit of capillary matting on the bench I can lift the individually without them breaking up the mix I used was 3 of compost 2 of soil and one of course sand, add water till it holds well together, but as I have said in an other post I think you could mould the mix by hand and it would do just the same, I was thinking of a measured amount rolled into a ball reshaped into a square which should give the same results

[rary]

Made up an other mix using 3 compost 2 soil and vermiculite 1 of washed course sand it holds ok but feels a bit more open will let you know how it performs

[boatsman]

There are quite a few youtubes about soil blocking, including diy soil blockers. I am in the process of making a soil blocker from a piece of 2" plastic pipe. I just used soil mix moistened with water. This tended to dry out and fall apart so I added juice from aloe vera leaves and this helped somewhat. When the weather gets warmer I plan to start over again with the soil blocks.