Soil Blocks Without A Soil Block Maker

Hey you all, Farmer Jesse here. We've been doing our potting up a little different than we used to do it, than we usually do it. So I want to talk about what we're doing differently and why. Let's do it. All right, so it's going to be a quick video. I've got to get to planting. This is what we usually use for soil blocks. We use soil blocks. We like soil blocks. We've used them for nearly 10 years now. And we usually use this thing, right? We pack it full of soil, put it down on a tray. In this case, I put it down on a table so you could see it. And then, yeah, and then we just take the soil block and we put it in and then we pack a little dirt soil right on top. And then that's our soil block. That's our potting up of tomatoes or peppers. This year I didn't want to do that. The compost that we have is really valuable. It's very expensive. We use the Vermont Compost Fort V potting mix right now. And it's awesome, but I don't want to use more than I have to. So it's a little bit, being a little conservative, but also I kind of just wanted to change it up a little bit. I wanted to try something a little different. So as you can see, we did all of our peppers this way. We did all of those tomatoes. It's over 200 tomatoes. I'm not sure how many peppers. And basically, there's two things here. One, I want to talk about why we're doing it. Why we're doing it is that Jackson and I read this book, Farming for the Long Haul, and it basically just like stopped us in our tracks. I think you should read it. Really great. It leans very heavily on what Wendell Berry says about farming and all those things. But it also talks a lot about how the way that we're teaching ourselves to farm now is not going to be relevant in 50 or so years when petroleum is really expensive, plastic is really expensive, gas is really expensive. So I'm just, I have it in the back of my mind to try things that are going to be relevant in 100 years, right? When maybe gas is way too just priced out of our range or, you know, and maybe that won't happen, but if it does, right? And it will eventually. It's a fossil fuel. It's a non, it's a limited resource in some capacity. So eventually humans will consume it all to the extent that it will be expensive, right? In theory. So anyway, I just think about this a lot. Like what are some methods we could use that don't really require anything? And this is one of them. So what all I'm doing is I'm taking a block out of a wind strip, right? We're using wind strips now. You could use, you could actually make the blocks the same way that I popped them up. You could just make little balls and put your seeds in them. But anyway, you take your block, wherever it comes from, either a soil block or a cell tray or whatever, and you put that into a big thing of wet soil mix and you just pack your soil around it. It's super simple. You can see how I did it a couple of different ways. I flipped the block over in one case. And I just kind of pack that soil around the soil block. And so you get just this nice little, you know, almost like pottery of soil mix. And it doesn't require this, which is expensive. I forget how much I'll put it on the screen. But those aren't cheap, right? And it doesn't require necessarily any plastic. You can put it on whatever. I have these trays, so we use them. And I like that you can kind of make these as small or large as you want. I fit 18 in some of these smaller pepper plants. Some of the bigger ones, I think we fit 10. The bigger tomatoes, I fit 10. These paste tomatoes here that are kind of spindly, we put close to 18 of those in a tray. So, I mean, you could make them big. I think peppers and tomatoes really like deep soil blocks. So you could make them really deep if you wanted to, if you needed to. Or like in my case, where I'm trying to conserve some soil mix, I made them a little smaller than when I make them in here. And I don't think it took me any longer, right? I think it was relatively the same. But I got to actually decide based on the plant how much soil mix to use. I thought that was kind of cool. But you could do this with very limited resources. So if you happen to be watching this from an area where you don't have access to soil block makers, or if you happen to be watching this 100 years down the road, which would be amazing, yeah, you could use whatever. And all you need is your hands and some wet soil mix, and you can make soil mix out of a lot of different things. We'll talk about that another time too. So there's an element of this that's kind of like primitive gardening. But I think it's really easy. It's really fun. I enjoyed doing it. I did like, I don't know, 250 of our kind of main season tomato plants. Maybe 300 of them. I don't know, like an hour and a half. Didn't take me that long. And there's no plastic. There's not like a ton of those little plastic pots. There's not a ton of this sound. We don't need more cowbell. It's just, you know, it's nice, quiet, easy work. So anyway, those are the kind of things I like to, I'm like trying to value more. It's just enjoyable work and things that are going to be relevant in 100 years, right? So anyway, I'm not going to try and take over the channel with that kind of stuff. But just something to think about. Something I've been thinking about a lot. Other than that, maybe this is ridiculous. You feel free to tell me it's ridiculous. Other than that, like this video if you like this video. Thank you all for watching. I'll see you probably in the next few days. Bye. We're going to sprinkle them all over.