Seed Starting: Cardboard Box

As mentioned in the last post, the seed starting trays you buy at the garden center are often very small and require one or two transplants as the plants get bigger before the final transplant into the garden. I think if you start with a bigger container in the first place, the re-plantings can be avoided later on.

I haven't tried this previously, but plan on doing so in the spring.

1. Get a corrugated cardboard box that was used to hold bottles which has card board dividers in it used to separate the bottles. A case of bottled beer is a good example of the type of box I am referring to.

2. Drink the beer. Gardening is hard work and this is one of those thankless tasks you'll need to suffer in order to ensure a successful crop.

3. Cut the box to the height of the dividers. This should be about 3 - 4 inches high. If the dividers themselves are very high, you may need to trim them to about 4 inches.

4. With a screw driver, poke three holes in the bottom of the box under each of the squares of the divider.

5. You should now have about a 4 inch deep cardboard tray with either 12 or 24 compartments made from the divider. Fill the tray with potting soil and plant seeds in each of the compartments.

6. Place the tray on a cookie sheet or similar and use as you would a normal seed starting tray.

The compartments of the box are probably 4 or more times the size of the seed starting trays from the nursery center. It also has the advantage that you can simply tear away the cardboard when it is time to transplant in the garden rather than having to knock the plants out of little pots. The cardboard will also bio degrade if it is not wax coated and can also be used in the garden as mulch after the seedlings are removed.

Seed Starting: Yogurt Cups

Seed and garden companies often sell nice plastic trays with individual compartments for starting seeds. These usually start out great, but are often too small once the plants get a little bit bigger and I often end up needing to transplant once or maybe even twice before the plants get transplanted into the garden.

Yogurt cups are about two to three times bigger than the average seed starting container. While some towns recycle yogurt containers with the plastics, many do not, and they are seen as a landfill problem that won't bio degrade away. They stack inside each other for storage.

1. Use an eco friendly brand like Stony Field Farms. They stopped using plastic lids and the product itself is good.

2. Wash the cup.

3. Carefully poke 3 holes in the bottom of the cup using a screwdriver or other sharp tool being careful not to press so hard as to crack the plastic. The power drill with a small bit will also work.

4. Fill the cup with potting soil and plant your seeds as you normally would.

For those of us in the North East, the time to start seeds is a little over three months off which should leave plenty of time to collect enough cups for the home gardener.

Nice Nursery Pots

This year, the local nursery is offering slightly larger transplants in slightly larger pots in addition to the usual “flats”. The plants are slight more expensive ($20 vs. $12) for fewer plants per flat, but I think the hardiness of the plants more than make up for it.

The pots are also a better size for seed starting:

The Mystery of the Mystery Plant

We throw any vegetable scraps (e.g. carrot peels, rotten fruit, etc …) directly into the garden to rot away with other yard waste and every year we get mystery plants. Mystery plants fall into a strange gray area as they are not weeds in the familiar sense, but they are plants not intended which grow from seeds thrown out from the kitchen. Given that it can be tricky to start plants from seed, there is a temptation to want to let them grow if for nothing other than to see what they are even if they are out of place. Cucumbers and melons are the most common mystery plant, but tomatoes and potatoes have also made previous appearances. One year, a grape vine even managed to sprout which we later transplanted to a nicer spot near the backyard fence.