For years I’ve relied on the professionals to start my plants from seed, buying them whenever they’d reached the fledgling stage. But this is very limiting. There are all these intriguing heirlooms out there, just waiting to be discovered by the adventurous gardener, but the problem is, you aren’t going to find them at most local nurseries. I mean, when was the last time you picked up a six-pack of “Aunt Ruby’s German Green” or “Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter” at Home Depot?

Even so, I probably would have been content to putter along with “Better Boy” and “Sweet 100” indefinitely, had I not read the veggie exploits of some of my more accomplished gardening friends. Tomatoes with curious names, peppers that date back to the Anasazi, corn that tastes like the Sun itself had married up with a swarm of drunken honey bees—they all sound so much more interesting than my Big Box Hardware fare. Still, I hesitated, thinking of how hard it would be to start those seeds, given the way my mind tends to wander from any long-term task requiring attention to details like, say, regular watering.

And then the catalogs came in the mail.

Well, I’m always open to adventure, but I also believe in hedging my bets, which in this case meant finding a way to keep the seeds uniformly moist through the germination process even if my focus on the task faltered. So I invested some good cash money in a seed starting kit from a well-known mail-order gardening supply company. It was the Cadillac of starter kits, sturdy and complicated, and priced accordingly. But it wasn’t long before my varieties outstripped the number of peat-filled holes and I needed to expand my holdings. So at my favorite local nursery I found a simpler, less expensive version and bought it.  And then later, when I needed just a few more peat pots, I found yet another, even cheaper seed starting kit from Big Box Hardware.

What all them have in common is a container to hold potting medium, a plastic tray to stop water from going everywhere, and a clear plastic lid to keep everything moist during the most critical stage of development, the germination. Where they differ is in ease of removing the individual pots from the kit and method of keeping the growing medium uniformly moist.

The most expensive version, at around $30, had a pre-formed Styrofoam base that could be flipped to poke the individual cells up and out of their containers and a felt mat that was designed to deliver water uniformly through osmosis. I added the potting soil.

The next most expensive, at  around $10, had no fancy flip-over Styrofoam base or felt mat, but did come with tidy little peat cells that puffed up when water was added, and divots in the base in which the cells sat, and in which water could be retained.

The least expensive, at around $5, had no mat, no divots, but tablets of a potting medium that started out a little bigger than a Sweet Tart and expanded like a live sea monkey to four times its size when water was added.

I placed all three on a warming mat during the germination period, in the same, bright, south-facing window.

All three germinated seeds. The Cadillac produced 23 seedlings out of 24 seeds planted, the mid-range kit produced 33 out of 36, and the cheapest produced 2 out of 5. Of the three, the Cadillac was the easiest to keep uniformly moist for several days at a time, but the mid-range cells were easiest to transplant. Both the Cadillac and the mid-range kits could probably be used again for at least a couple of years, if not more; the cheapest won’t last much beyond a single season or two. The cheapest didn’t seem to have any more advantage for seed-starting than any simple container might have, but the sea monkey action was highly entertaining and well worth the pennies I paid for it. These tablets are available all by themselves, though, so next year I may purchase them to use in the Cadillac.

So those are my results. I’m not sure what they mean, exactly, since the sample size is too small for statistical significance. Even so, I did find that all three made germinating the seeds fairly painless. The key was not in all the fancy, schmancy doo-dads, but in the clear plastic top, which created an important terrarium effect during the most critical time for moisture—the key to guiding the gardener past any challenges in attention span.

Do I think I paid too much for the Cadillac? Probably. I won’t need to purchase another anytime soon, though, so I’m not too unhappy about it. If I had to do it over again, however, I would probably spend my money on a couple of the mid-range kits with their ready-made peat discs, since this one seemed to work just fine for about a third of the cost.

And I’d buy the sea monkey tablets just for grins.