I ran to the general stores here in town yesterday, (Both of 'em!), and failed to find peat pots for starting seeds.
And I am glad I did, because it wasn't until this morning that I remembered the cheaper and more eco-friendly way of starting seeds that I read about last Summer, after I had already bought a multi-pack of compressed peat pellets.
Paper Pots!
Using basic origami, a tabloid sheet of newspaper can be repurposed as a seed starter pot. When your baby plant starts to get big, and needs to go outside to play, then you can drop the whole deal, pot and all, into your hole, without disturbing the delicate root structures your little plant has worked so hard to build. The newsprint will biodegrade harmlessly into the soil, leaving your plant free to grow healthy and big.
As a matter of fact, about half of the soil I will be filling these pots with used to be newspaper (and food scraps, and coffee grounds, and teabags, et cetera), before my little wormy friends digested it for me.
A word about peat. Peat moss (actually it's technically sphagnum moss) is very useful in gardening, because it holds moisture very well, and it can be compressed into forms that biodegrade easily, feeding plants as they break down. But peat moss is being way over-harvested, and is only a semi-renewable resource. So not only does making these starter pots out of repurposed newspaper save you money, and get rid of some newspaper clutter, but you do your part to save the fragile ecosystems of peat bogs, where peat (sphagnum) moss grows.
2 comments:
That's a nifty trick.
I am totally writing a post all about you.
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