Starting Seedlings in Homemade Paper Pots
Gardening for the brown-thumbed busy homeschooling mom, should be the title of this inaugural post in the gardening category of the Home Remodeling Help blog. Our refrain has always been, if you're going to do something, check if we've done it first to learn from our mistakes. I'm sure there will be plenty to learn from as I share my gardening experiences yet to come.
I've always wanted to have nice gardens. My mother has beautiful perennials beds under ancient trees around her Victorian home. Many of her perennials and bulbs have made their way to my yard: hostas, sedum, chives, irises, and I can't remember what all. The first year we were inspired by having to somehow fill in what used to be a wooded part of our yard - denuded by oak wilt. Our neighbors complimented our efforts, "It's starting to look good!" Their hopes were dashed the following year when we let everything get overgrown with weeds, having no time whatsoever to garden.
This year, verily I say, will be different. It already is. We're starting much earlier than usual. However it is later than we should be starting, at least one of our projects: starting seeds for the vegetable garden.
My son is in first grade, and part of his science this year is learning about plant life through having a garden. He loves tomatoes, so we are trying to start tomato seeds indoors to later transplant to the garden (or at least outdoor containers, I haven't decided about that yet). My mom tells me it's kind of late to be starting the seeds. But I am optimistic that there will be enough summer left for us to get some tomatoes off these plants. If not, I do have a back-up plan, more on that another day.
My son's science book is, ironically enough in my case, called Green Thumbs - A Kid's Activity Guide to Indoor and Outdoor Gardening by Laurie Carlson.
In it there was a cute little project, making seedling pots out of paper. In theory, you can fill the little paper pots with potting mix, plant your seed, grow a little sproutlet, then when it's time to plant it outside, pop it into the ground, pot and all (preferably after removing the piece of scotch tape on the bottom, which will let the roots out). It sounded fun. Unfortunately I knew my six year-old would not be up for making these little pots. They do require some dexterity.
So I made them myself.
Here are my materials. I used cubes from my son's math manipulatives to measure with since the dog ate his ruler and I was too lazy to go around the house and find a tape measure or other measuring implement. You can even see a couple of my first attempts, before I started measuring the paper.
To make the seedling pots from paper, I used construction paper and cut 4" x 6" rectangles out. You fold over 1/2" on the long side, then roll it into a cylinder. Tape it. Flatten the cylindar so the taped seam is in the middle. Cut a 1/2" slit in the folded over part at the bottom, all the way through all layers. Make it back into a cylinder and flatten it the other direction. Cut another slit, same thing. I then folded the bottom part over (as far as the slit went). Then I opened the cylindar again, now more rectangular actually, and folded the tabs made by cutting the slits onto each other, and put a piece of tape there to hold it. Voila!
Now just repeat a 100 times... well, actually there were only 30 tomato seeds in the first packet, so that was how many pots I made the first time out.
I hope to show you the progress in future entries. They are actually all filled now and planted with tomato seeds. I didn't take a picture of that yet. But I hope to! Yes, my hopes are high that my homeschooling motivation will carry out into the garden and bear much fruit this season.
And here they are - actual tomato seedlings sprouting in the little paper seedling pots. (They don't have the best structural integrity when wet, so I tried to pack them in so they won't fall apart.)
