Check out my seedlings, how am I doing?

calliandra said:

Yeah what Shluby said.

One thing though, maybe as a heads up for next time: you wrote "with the soil so dry".
Hm the soil shouldn't be dry.
In fact, you want to have it nicely moist (not waterlogged though!!) at all times to maintain the microbial herd in the soil. Wet-dry cycles are for people using bottles, in that system it has a use and may even be decisive for preventing pathogenic microbes from flourishing...

But when you're going for living soil, you want constancy.
Because you have a beneficial microbial herd you want to keep happy.
If you let the soil dry out too much, they'll go dormant, and they take their time waking up again. Soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham illustratively describes it as the microbes becoming suspicious of the environment and not trusting changes for the better, since going dormant and waking up again costs lots of energy.

So with organic soil, it's a really good idea to get the whole pot nicely moistened up before planting the seed, mulching it up and leaving it alone - easily a week or so - before starting to add small amounts of water outside the plant's dripline.
Cheers!

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