Thoughts on Growing Seedlings for Transplant

This year I am experimenting with a growing system that departs from my ongoing efforts with direct seeded crops, and this means that germinating seeds indoors and transplanting them out in the spring.

This got me thinking about how a permaculturist would approach this exercise considering that the typical gardener takes a sterile seed raising mix, puts it into one-shot plastic seed raising formers / trays, and plants their seeds into this.

This is all in an effort to avoid mold and a condition called "damping off" where young healthy seedlings all of a suddenly keel over and die.

But here's the thing. These seed raising mixes contain a lot of peat which as you hopefully already know is not a renewable resource. They essentially strip mine these deposits with machines that look like giant vacuum cleaners. Peat is also acidic.

Commercial seed raising mix also contains "special ingredients" that the manufacturer puts in to make their product better than the others. And since "special ingredients" often tends to be described as toxic gick depending on your point of view, I chose to make my own permaculture seed raising mix this year. 

Since I am also lazy and tight, I decided to not buy these plastic seed trays to raise my seeds. I found that they always split (by design?) and even though theoretically you can reuse them, in reality this isn't the case.

Pulling the seedlings out of these trays and 
gently placing them into the garden beds seems like a lot of tedious w-w-work to me too.

So what is a permaculture seed raising mix then and how is it different from the stuff you buy at Canadian Tire?

Well for starters, a sterile environment is really the antithesis of what permaculture is all about. I strongly suspect that the reason seed raising mix is sterilized is because the pre-sterilized mix is biologically so far out of balance that the cheapest and easiest way to address this is to nuke it.

Shouldn't plants be born into a rich ecosystem containing fungi, bacteria, and all sorts of living things we haven't even classified yet? Since stability arises out of complexity within natural systems, shouldn't we be seeking to make our seed raising mix as far from sterile as is humanly possible? Is it possible that the issues gardeners experience in raising seedlings comes from their growing media not being complex enough?