So my hosta seedlings just weren’t growing very fast, and seemed to be kinda stuck. Gave them some dilute worm tea, no change. Finally it occurred to me that it was the light.

Hostas are one of those rare plants with no photoperiod! They don’t need darkness. They will suck up all the light you give them. And my grow light was set at a height for my salvia cuttings, not my wee hosta flat.

My big garden splurge this year was a Stack-N-Grow light system for seed starting, so I assembled that with help from Kevin, plugged in the heat mat (seriously, heat mat is SO helpful) and stuck it under very close lights.

The other thing with hostas is that the seeds are super thin and lightweight, and they have almost no root system fresh out of the seed, so I kept finding them sprouting in midair where a seed had stuck to the side of the tray, and having to carefully stick them in dirt.

They don’t have to be covered to germinate, so they were just sprouting wherever. A website recommended a sharp pencil to help them into the dirt, which was a way better idea than my fingertips, which felt like gigantic sausages compared to the seedlings.

Hostas are monocots, which puts them in the extended family of grasses, and are actually a subset of the Agave clan! Which makes sense when you look at them. If you reverse engineered an agave to live in a Japanese forest, you’d get a hosta.

Speaking of splurges, though, CHECK THIS OUT!

I use a lot of the little seed tray things and the little plastic domes, and they work great and they’re super cheap at the feed store but they’re also kinda flimsy? They’re supposed to be disposable after a couple uses, and it’s just not real eco-friendly.

And I mean, I don’t fault anyone for using them, because hey, forty cents for a drip tray, but I had been on the lookout for something sturdier.

I also kept running into the problem of the plastic domes being too short. You’re supposed to remove them when the plants get big enough, but that’s for seedlings, not “nursing your temperamental salvia cuttings through the winter in the unheated garage.”

So I got this “EarlyGrow” propagator, and it’s super sturdy, and you can add extra extenders to the sides to give you more some space. There was much rejoicing!

Not cheap, like sixty bucks, and you could keep yourself in the cheap trays for a decade easy for that, but since I am a hobbyist and do this for fun, not a commercial grower panicking over the bottom line, I have the luxury of the splurge. Anyway, they’re really nice.

If you’re looking for a gift for a gardener—and I know, this would have been a good thread BEFORE Christmas—it’s the kinda thing they CAN probably use if they do seed starting, but might not buy for themselves. And easier than shipping a bag of bat guano.

...that said, if they have that kind of sense of humor, buy the gardener in your life a bag of bat guano fertilizer. They will love that shit.