Direct Sowing Purple Coneflower Seeds

Growing plants from seeds is probably my favorite part of gardening. My second favorite part of being a gardener is finding ways to make gardening easier for myself and spending less money. While I spend a lot of time growing seeds in plastic baggies, and making homemade biodomes, I find direct sowing seeds to be the best method for perennials. Take, for example, this purple coneflower seed head I direct sowed in the garden last fall. Purple coneflowers are so inexpensive at garden centers and nurseries, but they're even cheaper to grow from seed, especially if you direct sow your purple coneflower seeds in the fall.

Colored Plant Labels Make Planting Easier

One of the downsides, if it can be called that, about gardening is the obsession that can result from growing a single flower. For example, when I grew Zinnia ‘Green Envy’ I thought it would be the only Zinnia I would ever need. I quickly discovered that it would not be the case and every year I try a couple of new Zinnias, just to see. ‘Green Envy’ is still my first Zinnia love, but sometimes a gardener has to see what options are available to him. The problem arises when you try growing several cultivars and while planting them in the garden you discover that you forget which one is which. When plants are at the seedling stage, it can be rather difficult to tell them apart. I encountered this problem last year when I planned to sow seeds for Zinnia elegans “Green Envy,’ ‘Polar Bear and ‘California Giant.’ I did not want to create many homemade plant labels and spend an hour writing out the names. One afternoon while playing with the nephew it hit me: make color-coded plant labels and use them to keep track of the cultivars I was growing.

Make Plant Labels For Your Garden From Recycled Items

How To Make Your Own Garden Cloches To Protect Young Plants

Bell-shaped garden cloche.

Homemade Sub-Irrigation Planter Like The EarthBox and Grow Box

Last summer, at a farmers market, I met a photographer who was telling me about what it was like to be a professional photographer. As a gardener, his most interesting story was about traveling with a rock band ( I forget which one) that was socially conscious and liked to fund agriculture products in developing countries. They would start gardens in an Earthbox and auction them off at their concert stops. I'd heard about the EarthBox before and even the Grow Box before but the thought of these rockers starting gardens in them made them more appealing.

Paper Tube Seed Pot Holder

It is the time of the year when many gardeners start to get restless and and our minds turn to thoughts of spring and summer in our gardens. To get us through these tough times we start sowing seeds indoors and raise the sprouts in the hopes that they'll be bigger plants that we can plant into our gardens and or containers in the spring and watch them grow into full-sized annuals, perennials, edibles and tropicals. Gardeners are pretty creative in the methods they use to start seeds and have come up with many different tricks to save money in the seed sowing process. We grow seeds in plastic bottles, sprout seeds in plastic sandwich bags, roll newspaper pages into seed pots, use paper tubes and eggshells to grow seeds.


Other items that can be put into your seed sowing arsenal are plastic containers that you get fast food in or food items from your deli or bakery. I recently came across this plastic container for cupcakes and as I was about to throw it away it dawned on me that I could keep it and use it to sow seeds. This makes a perfect paper tube seed pot holder because the container is made of a really durable plastic and the circles are almost the same size as the paper tube seed pots. The lid seals the containers pretty well and is a safeguard in case your seed pots should ever tip over. Another benefit of this plastic container is of course that it is transparent allowing light but it has a flat top so you can stack several of these on top of each other. I like the ability to stack them because they take up less space and I can shuffle the seed pots to the top of the stack as the seeds inside germinate.

Here, a close-up view of the paper tube seed pot holder shows that I've cut the paper tubes into three inch lengths to give some head space so that the seeds don't touch the plastic cover when they sprout.

The seed starting "soil" I'm using here is actually coconut husk that has been finely shredded. If it doesn't look familiar to you it may be because it is mostly seen as a dry circular disk that you get in products like Amaryllis bulb kits. I don't like to use it to grow my bulbs in so I keep the disks around and use them as my seed starting soil. You can also find the same material in pet stores sold as bedding for reptiles. It is pretty affordable and comes in a brick form that you submerse in water to make it expand. It works just like the peat pellets you'll find in garden centers and garden catalogs except it is very sustainable unlike the peat. When preparing my paper tube seed pots I like to moisten the seed starting "soil" not only because you have to with the coconut fiber but because it allows me to pack in the soil and make sure that each paper tube is filled tightly with soil. This will help a little keep your paper tube seed pots together longer.

This is just a terracotta pot with several paper tubes inside of it. I found it like this in one of the bathrooms. I had accidentally left the empty pot in a spare bathroom when I was bring in plants this past fall and had forgotten about it. A week or so later I went looking in the bathroom for the lost pot and found it stuffed with paper tubes. No, I don't have a helpful family-they're just lazy.

What are your seed starting tips and tricks?

Related Posts

Plastic bottle seed starter.
Sandwich bag seed starter.
Seed starter pot from newspaper.
Homemade seed pots.

Affordable Cloches

In the indoor garden there is nothing quite like a cloche to really make a plant stand out. There's something about a plant protected by glass that automatically makes it seem special. Lately I've been seeing cloches used more as garden accents with sporadic instances of them actually serving a use in the garden. You can use them to start and protect seedlings or use them to root cuttings.

Where to find exotic garden bulbs for cheap

When you live in a big city you may find that you live closer to a number of big box stores. Sometimes they are conveniently located to you in comparison to a quality garden center. This is the case for me here in Chicago, where big box stores are closer to me than an independent garden center.

 

Cheap Bulbs For Your First Garden

There are many options to choose from when you're starting a garden but if you're a frugal gardener or gardening on a budget you learn to keep your eyes open for discounted plants, bulbs and gardening seeds. This week in the paper I came across this ad for a discount grocery store called ALDI. I'm not sure just how widespread they are across the country but they have a site you can visit and see if you're in their market. Here in Chicago these stores are not always in a very nice area and sometimes the neighborhoods they are in can be a little rough.