Upcycle Small Food containers or even the newspaper to start the seeds inside

By Jessica Damiano

If you plan to start the seeds inside this season, you probably know that you will need a growing environment (sterile and sterile start -up mixture is ideal), a sunny window or cultivation light and, of course, seeds. But have you thought about the containers you will use?

You may plan to buy trays on board, peat wheels or compartmentalized plastic apartments, but these are not your only options. With a little imagination, you can easily increase the items you already have while keeping waste out of the discharge and your money in your wallet.

Try a few small food containers

If you have a coffee maker that uses K-CUP plastic pods, do not throw them after brewing. Instead, peel off their aluminum paper lids, throw the coffee mills used and remove the paper filters below. The pods are the perfect size to start sowing and can be washed, disinfected and reused from year to year. You will notice that the machine even stung a hole in the bottom of each clove for drainage.

Most of the other small plastic food containers, such as serving money yogurt cups, salad packages or clanse -type egg boxes, are also well suited to start the seeds – as long as you have pushed holes in their bottom to allow excess water to flow.

The newspaper or the cardboard also work well

You can even make pots of seeds from newspaper sheets. A large part of today’s newspaper uses soy ink, which is generally considered non -toxic, adapted even to starting edible products.

Here’s how: Fold a newspaper page in half lengthwise, then fold it a second time to get a long band. Then place a box of tomato paste, which is the perfect size for a pot of seeds, along an edge of the newspaper, a few centimeters from the bottom. Then roll the newspaper around the box well to form a cylinder.

Fold the excess newspaper at the base of the box, adjust the wrapped box on the right and tap firmly against a flat surface like a table or a counter to strengthen the bottom of your new pot. If necessary, use a small piece of ribbon to fix the bottom.

Remove the box and voila! You have made a free start house for your sowing.

Instead of sprinkling conventionally, which could soak the newspaper, keep the surface of the soil wet with a spray bottle.

Or cut four 1 inch slits, spaced uniformly, around a end of a roll of toilet paper. Fold the resulting tabs and save them in place to create a solid background for your pot.

Why use such small pots?

As their names imply, the containers which demonstrating seeds are only intended for the first phase of the life of sowing. When they exceed these first pots, germinated sowing will have to be moved to larger containers to adapt to their expanding root systems.

Manage the fragile sowing roots in a hurry during repotting to minimize the chances of transplant shock (the jars of rollers of newspaper and toilet paper are biodegradable, it is therefore not necessary to remove the plants when the upward containers simply plant the whole pot in one larger.)

You may be wondering why you should not just start seeds in larger containers from the start. This is a logical question with an equally logical answer: the largest pots require a larger amount of repotting mixture, which would contain more water than the emerging roots of a sowing cannot absorb. This excess humidity would place sowing at risk of root rot, an often deadly plant disease caused by excess humidity.

It is also profitable to become smaller. The sterile start -up mixture is more expensive than the ordinary repotting mixture, and you will use considerably less in a smaller container than in a larger container. When you win young plants, you can use an ordinary repotting mixture in their height containers, but never use ordinary garden soil; It is too dense and can host pests or pathogens.

Jessica Damiano writes weekly gardening columns for the AP and publishes the weekly Dirt newsletter. You can register here for weekly advice and gardening advice.

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