Behind me we have the first seedling table here at the Epic Homestead.
I have to say, this is a massive upgrade. I will show you how I built it.
We'll put a cut list and parts lists in the description. But before this,
I was growing all my seedlings on two saw horses and a piece of
plywood that got run over by a truck. So it's not ideal,
not the most robust system.
And now we have something that's pretty darn good.
It's got a lot of the little doohickeys on it that I think make it a little more
fancy than your traditional seedling table.
I will say I can't take a whole lot of credit for this.
We made some modifications here,
but most of this comes straight from Laura over at Garden Answer.
Their video is fantastic. And I also link that in the description.
If you want to see more of a, all the way through how they built it.
Cause that's what I used to reference this.
So before we show you how it's built,
I'll just talk about some of the features of it that I really,
really like the first thing I really like is just the sheer size of it.
It's eight foot long by three foot deep.
And it's about 33-34 inches tall,
which is just about the height of a kitchen countertop.
So it's really easy to work from, even if you're tall like myself.
So I'll stand up and I'll kind of show you how it works. Now,
what I've have here is a standard 10 20 propagation tray.
So this is your nursery standard.
Typically you'd have some sort of cell insert in here.
We've got the Epic Six Cell Trays,
which is a product that we have check it out in the store.
It's really cool actually, but what's really nice is you can go one,
two and three with a little room for something extra behind
here, just like that, which is kind of just,
it's a nice little handy form factor. And then you got 20 inches down.
So you can go one, two, three, and a half, maybe all the way down here.
So you can aim some this way. Basically you can get about 12 or 14 trays on it.
Now, the next thing I really like is the cross bracing.
So we put a decent amount of cross beams across because I wanted
the weight plus the soil to not really bear down on this,
especially cause we're using hardware cloth.
So what you can see here is there's an edge right over here,
which is hard to see cause the pomegranates are blocking it,
but there's an edge right here and right here,
and you can see a tray will easily fit over both of them.
So you get a little double support and it's not just hanging out on this
hardware cloth right here. So from a construction standpoint,
it's fairly simple. It's just two by fours. I did redwood.
It's not super high quality redwood, but it's still pretty good.
And so you have your leg beams right here,
and then I did an entire bottom rack.
So this spans all the way across and this one spans across and then you have
this cross beam support. I don't really know the carpentry term for this.
Maybe someone in the comments can tell me,
but this provides a lot of extra rigidity because we actually put wheels
on this. So in putting on the wheels,
we just wanted a lot of mobility here so I can move this entire cart fairly
easily, even with a ton of stuff on top.
But the way we did the wheels was first of all,
you've got your leg beam coming down, right?
And then what we did is we got a threaded rod,
as well as the corresponding nuts and washers drove that through the entire
thing and then sandwiched the wheels on the inside. You actually put them on,
on the outside, which is probably better. However, uh, we miscalculated here.
So the only way we could make it work is have this sit on the inside because
there wasn't enough threaded rod to actually screw it down, but no big deal.
It still works quite well. I got the pneumatic ones,
so we're going to have to pump these up every so often to keep them nice and
inflated.
But we got a lot of mobility in the seeding table because of those wheels,
nothing fancy here, but just screwed on a nice handle. So when it's lighter,
at least you can pull it along. If you want to move it along a flat surface,
nice and handy,
a cool way to extend it is just having some ceiling hooks attached right here.
So I only have one right now, but if I want to,
I can hang whatever tools I want.
Obviously little trowel is a great one for a seating table and then I can remove
it for easy access to do my work. Hang it back up.
I could add as many as I want down here.
So just to show you a little more of the build itself,
what we have again is the, this is the eight foot piece for the front.
Here's the three foot piece or slightly less because you have to play with this
width here for the depth of it.
But we put a little block in here because we needed to offset the wheels
slightly. So this is the actual leg going down.
You can see it's on the interior.
That was just a little building quirk that we had to do because that's just the
way that we could make the mechanics of it work.
But the next piece you'll notice is the hardware cloth.
So this is hardware cloth, not chicken wire. It's a little bit more rigid.
Nevertheless, it was still somewhat difficult to roll out.
So we chose a three foot depth because that's the exact length of,
of the hardware cloth. It's three foot wide, which is really, really nice.
You can see no cuts here.
Nice clean lines just had to trim off this edge right here.
The chicken wire staples are really annoying, but once you get them in,
it holds it really well in place. And we did a ton of them.
So you can see there's one there, one there, one there, one there,
one there just to make sure that it's nice and rigid.
There's still a little play, a little give, but it's hardware cloth,
that's natural. And when you put it over, like I said,
that's why we spaced these braces about every 16 inches or so.
So no matter what, 16 inches of course, less than 20 inches.
So a 10 20 tray will fit perfectly on them.
So here I am standing up actually at the seedling table working or hopefully
working pretty soon. But what we have here is a nice streamlined system.
What I use are 10 20 propagation trays as sort of my base ingredient for how I
seed everything up. And so I've got the 10 20 tray here.
This one has some pretty robust tomatoes in it.
And what's nice is I like to use the ones without drainage holes,
because what I'll do is I'll - in the morning, I'll pre water a little bit.
So I'll water the tops, but then I'll also water,
maybe an inch up and just leave that water in there over the course of the day.
By the time the day's over, it's about four or 5:00 PM right now.
I only see a little sliver of water in there.
The plants have actually used that water and I've passively watered. Now,
if I need something to not hold onto a lot of water, well,
why do you think I have the hardware cloth?
It's because I can water directly through the seedling table.
So if I need something to not have water,
maybe what I'll do is I'll take them out and just lay them like this.
And then when I water over the top,
the excess water just drains directly onto the ground.
And that's perfect for me. So from a workflow standpoint,
I find it's really nice.
And then also what's nice is you can actually arrange this entire thing.
I haven't done it right now, but you could in young to old, right?
And so you could have a production line coming down where all of your young
stuff is over here. You pot it up, you pot it up. It goes out into the garden,
really nice little workflow for you. It makes things a lot easier.
I'm pretty pleased with this seedling table.
The thing that I like about it is I can do so much more to this. If I want to,
I can add another row for storing soil down here if I want to.
I could add some more modifications for holding tools.
I could put a tool rack on the back side of it.
There's things I could even do to expand.
Like I could even put like a back shelf on this. If I wanted to.
So very modular,
I can quickly whip another one of these up for maybe I would say $200.
If you use a little bit less expensive wood I chose the redwood that was a
little more expensive and wood is really expensive right now.
So this used to be a cheaper table than it is probably by the time you're
watching this video,
but the cut list and all the parts will be in the description as well as the
link to Laura's video. So you can see how it was built on a more granular level.
Obviously this one's already built.
I didn't really feel in the building except for that one little time lapse.
So unfortunately I don't have my build,
but hopefully this gives you some ideas for streamlining your,
your seedling operation. I mean,
obviously this is a little bit larger scale than many people's gardens,
but something like this,
or at least the mentality of how to work through the seedling table,
I think could be really helpful. So until next time,
hope you enjoyed this good luck in the garden and keep on growing.
Right.