Experienced clarification would help a shit ton!
Heh heh heh!
Here's what I do. After my seeds have popped in the jiffy pellets, I put them into 3-gallon pots of soil. I have plastic drip trays under each pot to catch drainage.
I tip or lift each pot now, to "calibrate" my arm to the weight of the pot when it was dry. Whenever the pot gets that light, going forward, I know it's time to water again.
I carefully handwater them with a 1-cup measuring cup very slowly. Which is to say, I add two cups tenderly to the soil as evenly as possible, then give it a half hour to soak in. Then I add another cup or two very slowly, and let it soak in for another half hour. Shampoo, rinse, repeat until you just start to get some drainage into the drip trays. Now you know how many cups each pot needs, write that down, and that's how much you will always use.
You will use that much....just more often...when they get bigger and drink more, but you will always use that much.
What drains into the tray I just leave, it gets sucked right back up into the soil within a day, and that conserves your nutrients so they aren't getting rinsed down the drain.
I think establishing the amount of water, and always taking your time to water slowly and thoroughly rather than just dumping in the whole amount is important.
I will often water from both the top and the bottom. If this batch needs 8 cups every time, I'll put two cups right into the drip tray and let that totally soak up first. Then I'll put two cups in the top, then later two more, then later two more. I usually spend an hour or two watering each time.
While I'm dilly dallying around waiting for the water to soak in, I clean the place, vaccuum up stray dirt particles, examine everyone real close to see what they are saying to me today, stuff like that.
I should mention that I use dry organic fertilizers mixed into my soil as my only nutrients, so I'm not feeding when I water my plants, just watering. I think these tips should work for anyone growing in soil, though, it's just that if you are water-feeding with chemicals you just have to flush all your plants periodically, and you would want all that to definitely go down the drain.
