TikTok’s ‘Snail Seed’ Trend Isn’t a Garden Hack
As long as people have been gardening, they have been trying to find easier ways to do it all. The first few times you try to grow seeds, you’ll inevitably end up with something wrong: not enough light, leggy shoots, moldy roots. But eventually you will find a system that works. Despite this, we are all looking for ways to do it faster, more efficiently and cheaper. I came across the snail sowing or seed snail trend on TikTok and was curious if it was a viable cheat for starting seeds. After four weeks, I can say that while seed snails work, they are no more effective, cheaper, easier or faster than traditional seed trays. I can’t find a compelling reason to prefer this method over conventional methods.
What are seed snails or seeding snails?
Seeds need three things to germinate: warmth, moisture, and a soil-like environment. For home gardeners, this is quite simple. You just need to put the seed in the ground, keep it warm on a heating mat and water it. Some seeds need to be buried deeper than others, some must go through a period of stratification , where they are exposed to colder temperatures simulating winter, and the seeds germinate at different rates. Cucumbers germinate in a few days, but snapdragons take weeks to germinate. However, the process is basically the same.
Rolling the snail gets rid of the seed tray (sort of – more on that in a moment). You simply lay out a paper towel, roll it filled with moist soil (kind of like an earthen cinnamon roll), and then stand the roll on the end and plant the seeds in the exposed soil, which will look like a spiral. Once the seeds have sprouted, you carefully unwrap the snail, pluck out the seedlings and plant them outside. Seems simple enough.
I was pretty sure this method would work since it involved putting the seeds in the soil and watering them. The problem was whether it worked better than traditional methods, especially conventional seed trays. So I planted one tray of zinnia seeds and a few rolls of the same seeds to see what would happen.
How to set up a snail roll
I used standard unprinted paper towels and folded them in half lengthwise, resulting in two layers of paper towels about three feet long. By using seed starting mix (which is different from potting soil or compost), I ensured that the mixture was moist enough to hold together when I squeezed it in my hands. I laid it on a paper towel from edge to edge, smoothing it out like I would for a sushi roll. You need to be judicious here because the depth of soil application depends on the size of the seeds. Small seeds, such as marigolds, need less thickness than pumpkin seeds, which are quite large. It was clear to me that packing it to the top and bottom was stupid: the soil was already falling off a little. Then you start at one end and carefully roll the paper towel towards itself, forming a jelly roll, and continue rolling the paper until the end. This is where the process encounters some obstacles.
Soft paper towel
First of all, even though the paper towel was folded in half, it still tore because that’s what paper towels are made for, so it was a pain to roll out. You could continue moving if the break occurred in the middle of the roll because subsequent parts of the roll would remain intact. But if this happens at the end of the roll, you’re out of luck – the roll falls apart. When you roll, the soil falls out, so you lose a lot of it. You want soil that is wet enough to stay put, but not so wet that it ruins the paper towel; it’s a delicate balance. You also want the soil thickness to be consistent. At the end of the rolling process, I was surprised at how easy it was to take the entire roll and flip it onto the baking sheet. It will help if you make several so that the buns support each other – a deep baking tray will help. I used a standard 1020 tray – this is a 10″ x 20″ tray that comes in a variety of depths and designs and is very common. While it certainly didn’t take long to make the roll, it did take longer than filling the seed tray, which takes less than 10 seconds. You simply spread the soil on top, tap the tray on a hard surface, add soil, and wipe off any excess soil.
More difficult to sow
To seed the roll, you insert the seeds of your choice into the top of the snail while it is standing on the tray. Depending on the type of seed you plant, you will plant it deeper or deeper – instructions are always on the seed packet. This part was easy, but it was more difficult than using a regular seed tray. Typically when planting you go row by row and because everything is level you can see where you have seeded and where you haven’t. It was much more difficult in the dirty snail rolls. It was also less effective. If you’re seeding an entire tray with one type of seed, you don’t need a seed chart to tell you which seed cell in the tray contains which seeds. For example, a whole tray of Benary’s pink giant zinnia is easy. But usually home gardeners don’t need a whole tray of one seed, so you can put many types of seeds in a tray: a row of pink zinnias, then a row of green zinnias, red zinnias, yellow, etc. One of my cabbage zinnias. the trays hold 20 different types of seeds and the chart helps me understand what is in each cell. It’s impossible to tell what’s what in a snail roll; everything just got mixed up. This means you also can’t tell which seeds haven’t sprouted, which is much easier to do in trays: you just see which cells don’t have sprouts and then check the chart to see what hasn’t sprouted. In a snail roll, you won’t even notice that anything hasn’t sprouted. I also didn’t like how much soil was used in the process of rolling out the snails: it was much more than I used for the same amount of seeds in the tray.
Can’t easily regulate humidity
Once the bale is sown, the seeds must be kept moist. Although you start with moist soil, you must keep it moist, but not so moist that mold develops. There are several ways to do this: For a traditional tray installation, you can use a moisture barrier with a clear plastic shell on top. As the water evaporates, it condenses on the lid and then falls back onto the seeds. There is very little water loss. Finally, once the seeds have sprouted, you remove the dome and water the seeds from above with a stream of water (they are too delicate for a watering can) or from below, which means you put a tray, the seedlings sit in a small amount of water (the soil will suck up the water as needed ). The snail method doesn’t really allow for a moisture-proof dome because the rolls are so tall, so after a good fogging I loosely covered the snails with plastic wrap. I placed the trays on a heating mat, the snails on one side and the traditional tray on the other, and just watched. Ten days later, my zinnias in the tray had consistently sprouted and were on their way to forming their first true leaves, which is the signal for the moisture dome to clear. The snails sprouted inconsistently and the paper became moldy from the moisture. One snail was partially destroyed. The plastic didn’t hold moisture very well; I had to water them much more often than the trays. However, after three weeks I removed all the plastic and started watering the snails from below, just like the trays.
Poor germination
Since I kept track of how many seeds were in the rolls and trays, I could count exactly how many seeds I lost in each one. Of the 50 cells in the trays, only two did not germinate. Of the 50 seeds I planted for the snails, 18 seeds did not germinate. We had a clear winner.
Zinnias in seed trays were able to cool in the trays until it was time to plant them, which was a few weeks away. They need a strong root system to survive transplant shock, and seed trays allow them to grow those roots without confusing those roots with their neighbors’ roots. The snails were deeper than the trays, which gave them more vertical space to grow roots, but not as much horizontal space since the seed tray cells were larger. So I started adding plant stems to the bottom water of the seed and snail tray and gave them another 10 days. While I would normally let them run for a few more weeks, for the purposes of the experiment it’s time to see what’s going on from the root’s perspective.
Transplant shock
To remove the seedlings from the seed tray, you simply need to push the seedlings upward with your finger from the bottom. The roots will be in the soil around the seedling and you can easily transplant it into the ground. For snail rolls, you need to carefully unroll the roll. This turned out to be difficult because roots grew through the paper. Turning around, you pulled out the roots. The roots of each seedling were intertwined with the roots of all the other seedlings in the roll, which meant that the roots had to be carefully plucked out to cause the least amount of damage. The soil that was held onto the seedling by the roots then basically fell off, so now you were planting bare-rooted seedlings that were sure to struggle.
Although it is too early to tell how each seedling will fare in the summer, it is likely that transplanting from a seed tray will provide more benefits. The transplanted snails experienced severe root shock. Again, while snail rolling clearly works, there was no part of the seeding process where it was easier, cheaper or more effective than regular old seed trays. Although seed trays may cost more than paper towels, they can be reused, and once you calculate the cost of additional soil for rolling snails and the rate of seed loss, you will benefit from using seed trays.