im almost positive i have to be doing sumthing wrong when im starting from seed
i just cant figure out what
I germinate seeds in Jiffy peat pellets. I soak them in warm water then squeeze them a bit so they aren't soaking wet, place the seed about 1/4" down and cover it.
I keep the pellets on a shelf under a ventilated humidity dome about the T5 in my veg closet where it runs about 82-86 degrees Fahrenheit for two days, then move them under my 6x T5 light. I've had 100% success with this so far, and they all stand up within 4 days, but according to many people I'm using a sub-standard method. I just keep doing it anyway. It works on all my veggies and herbs, in fact, so why should I make it harder? If I move to Hydro I'll probably grow from seed to harvest in 6" rockwool cubes, but until then I've been very happy doing it this way.
A couple thoughts on water quality; Look up your municipal water data, chances are that there's a lot of data on the contents of your water in the public domain. This data will likely tell you how much chlorine, chloramine, lead, arsenic, mercury, calcium, phosphorus, magnesium, copper, uranium and so on is in your water as well as the total PPM, and per-constituent PPM. This may put your mind at ease, or it may make you go buy an RO machine, it depends where you live. I looked mine up and now I even know what well my house draws from, and can crunch numbers on historical quality data over the last couple of decades. Also, I don't sweat chlorine and I never have, but if your water has a lot of it, you might want to. Chlorine content in water supplies varies a lot. Chloramine is much less variable and the standard concentrations are so low that I doubt they would cause any problems for your plants, and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence to support that idea, as others have noted.
Test the pH of your water before and after adding each formula of nutes you use, just to get a feel for it, if it is 6-7 don't even sweat it, especially since your soil has some dolomite lime in it. And then, if everything seems in a reasonable range, totally forget about it and just rock on. Soil is great like that. It took me longer than I would like to learn this bit of truth and my plants are doing better since I stopped messing with pH, but my water is flat 7.0 and is among the best quality overall in the country. (Now if we could just do something about those pesky laws...) The colored chemical dye test kit is a reliable and inexpensive way to test your water.
Hate on that, y'all.