In this video I walk you through 4 practical ways to start seeds indoors, and I focus on the seed snail/coil method because it’s been getting a lot of attention. I’m not saying it doesn’t work—it absolutely can—but my goal is always the same: get you great transplants without making seed starting more complicated, more messy, or more time-consuming than it needs to be. I compare the snail method to my overseeding-and-division approach, the standard 6-cell flats, and simple foil baking trays (plus I show why deep plastic shoeboxes are excellent for certain crops like onions). The big takeaway is you have to match the plant’s growth habit to the method. Onions and leeks can do fine in a coil because they make long, wiry roots and don’t always need potting up. But peppers and tomatoes usually need more space and often require potting up—once you start “up-potting” snails into bigger snails, the space savings disappears and the work goes way up. I also show the real-world drawbacks of the snail: soil falling out, gaps that break bottom-watering wicking, shading as canopies grow, and the fact that getting transplants out is the worst because you have to unroll the whole thing.