Seasonal Denial: Make Your Own Seed Starter Pots (With an Attempt at a Tutorial)

There's lots of snow on the ground. But I'm still in denial, convinced that spring is right around the corner.

In the spirit of this we already ordered seeds and they have arrived. We also went through our old seeds and pulled out all the ones we'll try this year:


Not a great picture but it was the last decent one I got. Why you might wonder? Well did you notice a shadow looming in the upper left hand corner of the picture? It foreshadows what happened next:


And then this gesture which was just unnecessary:


You might think I stage this stuff but I swear, I was trying to grab a few quick pics and he interjected himself into the photo shoot totally uninvited.

But back to gardening. Feeling a little overwhelmed this year by all the different seeds that need to be started and the new beds that need to be dug in time for those seeds to be transplanted I printed my own calendar to keep track of it all. It's super boring, I could have made it much fancier.


But what would have been the point of a nice calendar when my horrendous handwriting is going to inevitably ruin it?

If you have denial like me and you want to start preparing you can make your own seed starter pots out of newspaper. Here is my kind of tutorial (this is as close to one as you'll get from me):

Newspaper Seed Starter Pots:

1. Start with some newspaper (discard the sheets that are just a single page, they aren't wide enough.) You will also need a glass bottle (although I suppose any material would work, as long as it's open at one end). Mine was 2 inches across at the bottom and 4.5 inches tall. Another size might work but I haven't experiment enough to be sure. I told you this wouldn't be much of a tutorial!

2. Cut the newspaper into strips across the width. I made mine as wide as the bottle I was using. (And they'll be as long as the newspaper when it's folded open. You need this much length for it to work.)

3. One strip at a time wrap them around your bottle.


4. With the opening of the bottle on top pull the roll about halfway off the bottle.


5. Starting with the seam where your strip ended fold the top part into the opening of the jar.


Do this all the way around.


6. Pull the pot off and flip the jar over and stick the bottom of the jar into the pot to squish down the bottom.



7. Your pot is done!


The bottom may look a little funky but as long as all your dirt doesn't fall out it should be fine.



Now repeat as many times as necessary. Here is what we got done so far:



The advantage of these is that you can put the whole thing right in the ground. But it's probably a good idea to rip off some of the extra paper if possible and make sure the bottom is open for the roots to escape. Despite this it's still better than having to totally uproot the poor little seedling. Much less traumatizing.

And in case you were wondering; those were NOT my hands making the pots. My finger nails are much nicer.

P.S. I'm sure there are other variations of this out there and maybe even this exact same version. My mom has been doing it for years so she doesn't remember where she first learned.

P.P.S. Feel free to tell me anything that isn't clear. I'm still working on the whole tutorial thing.

Starting to Think About the Garden

So maybe this is a little preemptive but we had a garden planning session this week. It's probably the bout of warm(er) weather but I started to feel anxious that we hadn't ordered any seeds yet. So we ordered...lots of seeds. In all we spent $30 including shipping. This may not sound super frugal but if you figure how many plants we could have bought with this had we waited till spring and bought baby plants it wouldn't have been many.

So here is the run down of what we bought and where:

From Seed Savers Exchange:

1. Ground cherries (a.k.a cape gooseberry): These are totally weirdly awesome fruit/veggie things we discovered at our local farmer's market. They are reminiscent of tomatillos with their papery husk but taste very citrusy, kind of like pineapple. And for those of you with a very good memory I posted about them last summer and even threatened to grow them.

2. Tomatillos: We love salsa verde and tomatillos are just so expensive at the farmer's markets we figured we should just grow our own.

3. Double yield cucumbers: One of the only things we were successful growing last year was cucumbers so we decided to test our luck with this variety that is supposedly "remarkably productive".

4. Dragon carrots: I really don't care for carrots, especially cooked but I can never resist a purple vegetable so we'll give these a go even though our root crops are usually wildly unsuccessful. (Our radishes are generally inedible.)

And from the Bountiful Garden's catalog (website here):

1. Lemon cucumbers: Cucumbers that look like lemons? How could I resist that!? Plus they are supposedly excellent pickles and rust and drought resistant.

2. Pak choi (a.k.a. bok choy): I love bok choy, especially in wonton soup.

3. Southern giant curled mustard greens: We needed some quick greens for the areas of the yard that get good sun early but get too shady in the late summer. This plan might work...in theory. We'll see.

4. Spearmint and peppermint: We are mint fiends. We put it in various Asian foods, I make mojitos with it and we drink unholy amounts of mint tea. We have a little in the yard but we're going all out with a whole bed this year. Mmmmm...mojitos.

We even walked around the yard and planned out what we'd put in existing beds and where we could fit some new beds. There was a lot of discussion so I used my master draftsman skills to draw up a plan so we wouldn't forget our ideas. It may be a little technical for you but it gives you a general idea:


I know that was a lot of information to take in so here is a close up of one corner in case you'd like to copy my technique:


For those of you not familiar with technical abbreviations it says (from top down): all mint bed/early greens, early greens, all cucumber. Don't be intimidated by my skills, you don't need to be so proficient in planning to design your own garden beds.

So now we need to get to work making lots of little pots out of newspaper to start seeds in. Look for a post on that soon!