The very best price point ever is "free"!

I agree that 128-cell, 72-cell and 50-cell trays don't need to be watered as often.

Even more helpful for me is that they are more "forgiving" if I wait too long to pot the seedlings up or plant them out.

Around how many days or weeks can you leave a tomato seedling in a 300-cell after it emerges? I guess 288 cells are around a 12x12 plug tray ... less than an inch wide?

The trays are 21X11, and each cell is 3/4 inch wide, and 1 1/2 inches deep. still, I have to keep an eye on these and several need watering every day. I imagine a tomato, or pepper, or any other plant in a cell this small will be transplanted according to size. Many of my peppers are just sprouting now, and I think that somewhere between 3-4 weeks they will have a fair amount of root structure developed to transplant. What I get to wondering is where I am going to put all of these plants if most of the seeds sprout......I've tallied over 1300 seeds planted! I hope a lot of people will buy plants! HeHe

>> I think that somewhere between 3-4 weeks they will have a fair amount of root structure developed to transplant

Wow, that's pretty good. I also like to have a good root ball before I pop them out of the cells. As long as I don't wait TOO long, I think that's less damaging to roots than having the root ball fall apart and disintegrate when my clumsy fingers try to get it out of the cell and into the ground.

evoyageur said: What I get to wondering is where I am going to put all of these plants if most of the seeds sprout......

Yes! Me too! I'm picturing 288 or 300 4" pots all trying to fit into less than 2 square feet like the 1020-size tray they came form. More like 32 square feet - a 4' x 8' hoop tunnel or cold frame?

I will probably use 128 cell trays for everything I start early this year. I've used 288's, which dry out too quickly, and 72's, which caused too much damping off, so 128 cell should be a nice compromise. The 128's are 8x16 configured which means I can plant 8 seeds per variety, up to 16 varieties... I'm obsessively organized!

My concern with planting so many varieties in one area is with cross-pollination. Any opinions/suggestions on this? I could spread out to other gardens, but my sunny areas are very limited. I don't expect more than a 50% germ rate, as my seeds go back as far as 6 yrs, After weeding out the weaklings, I don't expect more than 50 healthy starts.

>> cross-pollination

Bagging? That's tedious, and small-scale, but it works.

You could wait to see which variety goes to seed first or most vigorously, then uproot everything else of that species. Then pick all the fruit from your seed plants for several more days to purge cross-pollinated fruits. Then save seeds from the next round of harvests.

Of course, you might have a dozen varieties of some species like Brassica rapa

Have you considered saving mixed-parentage seed from year to year? You would not have the original heirlooms that you chose, but the hybrids will be selected for suitability to your micro-climate and local pests. You would probably have to work each year to find the plants that gave the fruit you like best, and only save seed from those. (It's also good to "rouge out" the worst third of any crop, if you are trying to steer a hybrid mixture of genetics into the particular traits that you want.

That approach is like making a mini-landrace.