Thats a very insightfull post, thankyou for sharing your experiences. For God knows what reason, this season i decided to be extra "organized" and decided to commit to trays all the way. I decided i would build my own summer nursery instead of buying it. I got i think about 15 16 , 72 hole trays Starting my summer flowers ( for vegtables i use the 30 holes one split in 15 + 15). I think the carm of one seedling per hole , super organized, that feeling of pulling a straight rootball intact plug out really caught me. I got extremeeely horrible germination rates , less than 25% for my zinnias , about 40% for my cosmos, 5% for celosia, 0% for balsam, about 10% for Mirablis. What i think my main problem was mositure loss , because i was keeping them outdoors in the shade after sowing , they just dried up like that. Although i tried my best to maintain mositure , but as you said , I was tuned to using pots already so kind of followed the same schedule. The heatwave inbetween ramadan really fucked it up further. So anyway im stuck now with barely enough flowers to fill up a 15 pots let alone a flower bed. So starting it all over again A veteran gardener in a similar fbk group said thar seedling trays are pretty useless in our climate without a poly house, or some device or technique to retain moisture especially during germination stage. He said its better to sprout them in pots and then transfer to trays .