Epic Gardening Seed Starting Trays and Seed Line Review

In this video, I test out the Epic Gardening seed starting trays, and sow some seeds from their new seed line, and give my honest thoughts and opinions on them, based off of my experiences.

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[Music] another day another product trial Today I’ve got some seeds seed starting trays and well trays for the seed starting trays I guess these are what are called bottom trays All from Epic Gardening I believe Epic Gardening has had these seed starting trays for a while now but their seed line is what’s new I was able to choose five seed packets from their new line And I chose this America spinach because it’s supposed to be heat and drought tolerant Red cherry maragolds because they make a great companion plant for lots of other plants Carbon tomato because I’ve heard good things about this variety Patio pride snap peas because I am a small spaced gardener so I am curious to see how well these grow especially in containers And then Soundwave jalapenos because these are supposed to be huge and I love a good jalapeno popper but it’s a pain to get the cream cheese in them So I’d hope these larger ones would be less tedious to make poppers with These seed starting trays have six cells each and there is a large hole on the bottom to make it easier to pop your seedlings out when you’re ready to upot or transplant them And there’s also some other drainage holes or slits on the sides Over here I have my Sila seedlings seed trays and I really do love them I think they are awesome and so far they are my favorite seed starting trays But I am always interested in trying new products and also I’m always sewing seeds So I need all the seed trays I can get But it would take a lot for me to ever completely ditch the Sila seedling trays for something else Size-wise these are smaller than my Sila seedling seed trays but I feel like these epic gardening ones will be great for succession sewing where if I just want to quickly get things germinated and transplanted quickly And the silicings I think will remain my choice for things that need a little more time or takes a longer time to grow before transplanting But these do feel pretty sturdy And if I recall Kevin from Epic Gardening either ran these over with a car or did something to try and smash or break them and he couldn’t Now I’m not saying you should go and try it and I am not even totally sure if I am remembering this correctly but the point was that these are sturdy and will last and shouldn’t break or crack and can be reused for years and years I’m going to go ahead and get these filled up with some cocoa ko For seed starting this is what I use I don’t use a fancy mix for seed starting I’m in the camp of seeds don’t need nutrients to germinate And if these are going to be transplanted quickly after they germinate I don’t really need to use anything special So let’s get these filled and start sewing some seeds [Music] Okay I got all of my trays filled up nicely These are looking pretty good They were pretty easy to fill up And I am going to sew the spinach marold and pea seeds in these trays And the carbon tomato and soundwave jalapeno seeds will be grown hydroponically like all of my other tomatoes and peppers [Music] All right all of the seeds have been sewn and have been watered in So hopefully these will all germinate quickly so I can transplant them and probably turn around and sew even more seeds Okay so it’s been 15 days and so far I’m not seeing a lot of germination even though we have had some warm days Just a couple of sprouts here and there So I’m just going to go ahead and reso everything because I feel like there should have been more germination by now So it’s been exactly 1 month since I’ve resewn the seeds and there’s not a lot of action going on There hasn’t been much more germination I did pot up the very few that sprouted and sewed some more seeds in their place but overall I’m really disappointed with the germination I’m especially disappointed because even though this is a new seed line with Epic Gardening’s name on it in case you didn’t know Epic Gardening bought or acquired Botanical Interests which is a highly reputable seed company And honestly I think they just took Botanical Interests seeds and rebranded them for Epic Gardening Let me show you why I think that So here is a pack of plelano seeds from Botanical Interests And here are the Soundwave jalapeno seeds with the Epic Gardening label inside They both chose to have the foil wrapper for the seeds And the packets are the same The writing is the same I really do think Epic Gardening just put their label on Botanical Interests seeds which is why I’m disappointed Not because they rebranded them or put a different label on them but because Botanical Interests has always been highly reputable My carbon tomato and soundwave jalapeno seeds germinated without any issues in my hydroponic units But I am really shocked that the other three seed types that I sewed had such poor germination if these are basically botanical interests seeds And let me show you what happened to the pea seeds This is what really shocked me So they’ve either turned to mush or just disintegrated or disappeared So this basically means that the seeds have rotted It looks like I do have one that has germinated but that was likely a resewn seed And this can happen for a few reasons It can be from overwatering the seeds and then they rot poor air circulation or sometimes soil born diseases But these were clean seed starting trays I used a clean growing medium as I had just taken a fresh cocoa koer block out of the packaging and expanded it before sewing And since these were outside the circulation shouldn’t have been a problem There may have been other issues at play but one of my friends got the same variety of pea seeds also from Epic Gardening and had the same results as I did So I don’t really think it’s a coincidence I do have a really hard time giving a negative review on something like seeds because it definitely can be user error and perhaps it still was but pea seeds actually sprout very quickly and easily in my opinion and they are one of the fastest seeds to sprout And as I mentioned my friend had the same results So in this instance at least for the peas I feel like the quality of the seeds weren’t great and perhaps there was something wrong with this lot of seeds For the spinach and maragold seeds having poor germination I’m not sure if it was user error either but all I can do is try again and hope For the seed starting trays though I’ll remove a tiny seedling just to see how easy it is to pop them out I’ll try it with my marold seedlings And this is just some fluff from my giant oak tree So I’ll tilt this over and we can see some roots coming out And I’ll just push the seedling out of this large hole on the bottom And whoops I think my soil was too loose for this to work properly So I think I’m going to gently compress the soil down into these cells before trying to pop them out just so they come out a little cleaner Okay Yeah there we go That was better And it was pretty easy And I definitely think that making sure the soil isn’t super loose or that you compress it a bit first will give you a cleaner removal from the cells I do like these seed starting trays And as much as I love my larger silo seedling seed starting trays like I mentioned earlier I think these smaller cells from Epic Gardening work just fine for things that you want to succession sew and transplant quickly And even though some of my silic trays also have six cells per tray they are larger than these epic gardening ones So again for things that I am just trying to quickly sprout and transplant and can’t direct sew these will be great I don’t do a lot of direct sewing because birds will peck into the soil and eat my seeds or the pests under the soil will get to them as soon as they germinate just before or as soon as they come above soil level So yeah I think having these smaller easy to fill cells are going to be helpful And Epic Gardening does have a larger size of the seed starting trays too I do also like that they are sturdy and built to last and seem easy to clean And the large opening on the bottom is nice And the bottom tray is well just a bottom tray There really isn’t anything super unique about it but it does the job And it fits 12 of the six cell seed starting trays nicely in it However on the seeds I’m a little divided on my feelings As I mentioned earlier I am always hesitant to give a bad review on seeds because it could be user error But I’ve been sewing seeds for a while and I’ve never had such poor germination for spinach or maragolds before or bad luck with pea seeds So there likely may be an issue with this lot of pea seeds Although my friend and I compared lot numbers and his pea seeds that did the same thing were from a different lot number So they may have gotten a few bad batches of seeds So I would say that the Peas were an epic fail if you will However knowing how good their customer service is I think they will be receptive to my feedback and not every brand or company will get everything right all the time And they also do have other seeds as well This was just five that I tried And like I mentioned the tomato and the jalapeno seeds germinated without issues So I wouldn’t completely write off their seed line but I think I will stick to the other seed companies I’ve used for now especially since currently the Epic Gardening seed line is somewhat limited at the moment anyway So I ultimately still do recommend these products but if you do get a bad batch of seeds don’t be afraid to reach out to customer service because they will make it right And I do think that’s what sets good companies apart from not so good companies And as always if my experiences or thoughts change on any of these products or if I get to try other products from Epic Gardening I’ll be sure to do an update [Music]