Rick, It's interesting how we all learn different ways to manage the soil we have in our gardens. When I first started this garden, I did put organic material in my planting holes. Ooops ! When the organic material decomposed, the plants sunk ... not good. Now, I only put the organic materials on top of the soil. It still improves the soil over time.
This year, I am adding some sandy loam to the beds, but in small amounts because I don't want to create concrete. It's hard enough to garden in glacier slurry.
I think the key to any successful container gardening is drainage. It was your comment about adding bark nuggets to your mix that made the light bulb go off in my head to let me know the "why" leaving small rocks in my native soil is working.
For container gardening, the soil mix is impacted by the ambient air temperatures in your climate as well as the soil mixture. I have to use a heavier soil mixture in my hot and dry climate to retain moisture than a gardener in a more humid climate should use because just the fact that the air around the containers is dry will wick the water out of the container faster.
But back to Rookie's original question:
You said you planted your seeds in a mix of " in a mixture of soil, husk charcoal and manure (3:1:1)". I haven't grown many things from seed, but have propagated a lot of rose cuttings. I would never add any manure to the planting mix for any of the cuttings for two reasons: 1) most manures are simply too strong for young roots and will burn them, so even if your plants were not overly moist, you have added an element that can very possibly harm the new roots; and 2) manures, and in fact all plant foods, add salt to the soil.
When the soil... or planting medium ... contains more salts than what is naturally found in the cells of a plant, nature automatically tries to equalize the imbalance and, in this case, will pull water
from the new roots to the soils because the soils contain less moisture than the plant cells, so the roots lose water. Clearly that is not going to help a new plant grow into a healthy plant.
For my rose cuttings, after they have produced new top growth, I will fertilize with a very, very weak solution of liquid fertilizer to bring them forward to where I can plant them into a larger container.
As you can see, there are a lot of variables. However, I think the best answer to your question was Chelle's when she said, "Some plants are more demanding than others; even within the same general group." I know with roses, some roses root like fire while others are incredibly difficult to propagate. So, I can't handle all of them exactly the same way. This may be true about planting different kinds of morning glory seeds.
Smiles,
Lyn
