2024 will be my sixth year starting my entire garden (and then some!) from seed. At the end of 2018, just before we purchased the homestead, I had been watching a number of my favorite gardening channels on YouTube preparing for the coming Spring, just dreaming of all the things I could tuck into the few raised garden beds outside our rental home; and on a wild post-miscarriage whim I bought enough seeds to start my entire garden from scratch. I succeeded in my goal of keeping my hands busy and my heart out of a wallowing pit, but I probably could have eased into it a little more softly! However, I give full credit to that trial-by-fire experience for making me into the gardener that I am today. I learned so much in that first season and was rewarded with enough harvest to give me a permanent gardening bug.

Fast forward to 2024 and I have tried as much as possible to limit the external input the garden requires now that the initial investment is done and over with (phew!). I do my best to make my own compost; we reuse and recycle as many materials and products as we can; I propagate and save as much seed as I can from my own crops; and I have reduced the annual acquisitions that the garden requires to just a bit of seedling mix and whatever seeds I will need for the coming season. We even built a worm farm to make our own fertilizer – although the unlimited supply of worms for fishing doesn’t hurt the pocketbook either!

In the spirit of filling my own needs on the homestead I was thrilled to introduce rabbits to our property. Not only are they a great source of meat and manure, they are also a wonderful project for my four-year-old son to assist with. He loves anything to do with the rabbits and mucking is no less important than feeding! So when I told him we would be using the precious poo-pellets we had been collecting to give our garden seedlings a good head start, he was overjoyed. I may have shed a tear as a proud mama!

I can honestly say this seedling mix, which I used for both soil blocking and potting up, has made a huge difference in the overall health of my plants. Normally by the time the temperatures stabilize enough for me to transfer warm-weather crops to the greenhouse, the poor little guys can be a little spindly and discolored. I have had no such problems this year. Each and every seedling has turned out robust and beautiful in spite of their extended stay indoors!

And because rabbit manure is so innocuous (as far as manures go) it’s safe to put directly on your plants AND your seeds. It doesn’t pose any risk to the gardener to handle, it doesn’t have any kind of off-putting odor, and it completely disintegrates into the seedling mix almost like it was never there – save for the fantastic results it produces! Are you sold yet?

If you are, you can find my recipe for rabbit manure seedling mix below. If you don’t have rabbits you can almost always find a source for pellets on your local buy or barter sites, or even substitute other types of “cool” manure that you have readily available, like alpaca or llama pellets.