seed pot tutorial # 1

in honour of the temperature being all the way up near freezing today (and so balmy and summerlike, compared to the -30 and colder that i've gotten used to over the past four months) i will show you one of the ways i make my seed pots.
i'm not into paying for peat pots that destroy the planet. instead, i save my toilet paper rolls and paper bags for a while and make my pots out of them. that way i'm reducing, reusing, and upcycling. see how green i am?

this tutorial is for the very simplest possible seed pot. let me demonstrate.
did you catch that? because it's the whole thing. i'll write it out.

1. cut a toilet paper roll in half. (if you want a nice collar to protect your tomatoes from the horrors of cutworm, leave the roll whole but only fill it 1/2 or 2/3 with soil)
2. cut a strip of newspaper or paper bag (i prefer the paper bag, it's sturdier) that's long enough to wrap around the length of the roll and then some, and wide enough to cover the circle of the roll.
3. place the roll in the middle of the strip and pull the paper up to the top and tuck the ends into the roll
4. fill with soil. the soil will hold the paper in place.

next you put the pot in some sort of tray under a good window, plant your seeds, and let them grow.

you'll need to support the bottom of the pot when you move it, since the paper is going to slowly rot and become even more prone to tearing. but that's the idea, since you want the pot to biodegrade as the plant grows, once you transplant it outside.

if when you plant your pot in the soil, if you're nervous about the roll not decaying quickly enough, you can slide it out of the ground, leaving the plant behind. i don't think it's an issue, though, since the pot is so short that roots easily spread out below it.


my other method of making seed pots involves folding origami boxes. i've slightly modified the basic box design that you can find anywhere. (the regular plan makes a wide, low box, and i prefer something cube-ish)

if there is interest i can post a tutorial on the origami pots. is there interest?