I have many garden lusts on Pinterest. (So many projects, so much easier to just
drool over them on the internet.)
However, I try to be intentional about turning my Pinterest
inspirations into reality, be it attempting DIY crafts, incredible looking
recipes, or great recycling projects like this one, a mini greenhouse for
starting seeds made from empty toilet paper rolls and plastic containers.
I loved this project because it was free to make, it used items I actually have
in my house (toilet paper rolls, and plastic salad bins), and it accomplished a
project I had intended to do anyway, start some tomato seedlings.
Depending on your household and how many seeds you want to
start you might have all the supplies on hand immediately to start this
project, or you might need a few days (or weeks – those who do not use much
toilet paper) to save them up.
What you need:
you can visit the link for a complete
tutorial.
1.Empty toilet paper rolls, for each of my salad
bin I needed 6 rolls, cut in half (the toilet paper rolls decompose in your
garden so bonus!)
2.Plastic bin like those from organic salad and
spinach. I also made one from a rotisserie chicken and one from a cinnamon roll
container. (So don't think you have to be all super organic or healthy to do this project.)
3.Potting soil: I just bought some organic potting
soil
4.Seeds: Your choice
5.Scooping utensil for transferring dirt and water
I ended up planting four containers. Two full containers I planted with some
heirloom tomato seeds I saved from last summer. I planted a total of 24 starter
pots full of tomatoes. Most of these
sprouted so I will definitely have plants to share with friends in a few weeks
(bonus!). In the other two containers I
planted 6 pots each of chili de agua, zucchini, oka, and tomatillo. The chili pepper seeds I had saved from last
year’s the garden and the zucchini, okra, and tomatillo seeds I had bought last
year but didn’t plant. So, in this
entire project the only thing I actually bought was the organic potting soil,
which was on sale, and for me, a worthwhile investment in my gardening
adventures this year.
For me, the direct costs for this project were less than $7.
If I had bought each of my 52 plants for around $2.50 each I would have spent
$130 (not including tax). If I had
bought a similar seed starting greenhouse kit like this one at Burpee.
I would have bought the 72 cell planter for the cost savings
and spent $14. So, even looking at it from this angle, I still saved 50% of my
costs by recycling products I would have otherwise thrown away. Recycling options in my city are not very
convenient and they only accept a pretty limited amount of items, so if not for this project I would
have tossed the four bins and 26 cardboard toilet paper rolls. And isn’t that
the heart of recycling, creatively accomplishing what we want to do with the
resources we already have?
My whole initial gardening desire was born out of a heart
connection to my grandmother. As long as I knew my grandma she had a garden,
and it was not uncommon to find seeds from all kinds of fruits and vegetables
wrapped in paper towels or towed in jars all over. In fact it was one of the little comical
quirks she had that made her so lovely. She
passed away in the spring of 2007 and as a way to honor her I wanted to
cultivate her garden. In a way, her
garden itself is a family heirloom.
But, I will just be really honest with you, I am a bad
gardener. Really bad. Like I am only successful if I grow plants
that flourish when neglected kind of bad.
When anything I plant grows at all I am pretty ecstatic and don’t get
too upset when things don’t work out because I, say, forgot to water them for
three weeks during 115 degree summer. I
really love the idea of gardening, but the actual work of weeding and
remembering to water and all of that cultivation stuff is hard for me. But for a wide and ever evolving set of
reasons, I continue to go at it. I have had a lot of failures, and it is a
blessing that in spite of whatever hopes I have to one day be able to grow all
my own food, I have not had to rely on my own garden to sustain me. My grandmother’s generation pioneered the
victory garden, and I have pioneered the failure garden.
I first really became interested in heirloom plants after
that first gardening year without my grandmother when I planted and fell in
love with a pepper and a tomato. Love at
first bite. The pepper, chili de agua, had an intensity somewhere between a
poblano and a jalepeno, and the black cherry tomato, a sweet, dark, mellow
fruit that I searched for at farmer’s market stands for years after. Maybe it was the fact that this chili was
absolutely perfect filleted on a summer burger, or that this tomato was
different than the standard red cherry tomato you can buy in the store that
caused me to want to seek out these particular varieties. After a couple years of searching, I finally
discovered the heirloom tomato farm from which I had originally encountered
these plants at a garden fair and planted almost my entire garden full of
tomatoes, peppers, and some herbs. I
would have been swimming in salsa if it had not been the hottest driest summer
in Oklahoma in decades.
This year I really wanted to save seeds and ensure I never
was without my beloved chili pepper and tomato plants so I began to research
heirlooms. The more I learned, the more
I felt like it was something I wanted to support beyond just my tomato
obsession. It is true; you can’t walk into a grocery store and find these
particular varieties of vegetable and fruit.
In fact, where I live, the selection of produce is so ordinary that
trying to eat healthy can get really boring.
There is something in my spirit that says, it is good to grow these
plants because they are different. It is
important to grow these plants because that means that they will continue to be
enjoyed. And so, soap boxes about our nation’s food systems aside, I just want
to continue to enjoy these plants, and that has led me to where I am today,
learning about heirloom seed saving.
According to seedsave.org, vegetables that produce seed the
same season as planted and are mostly self-pollinating are the ideal varieties
for beginner seed saving gardeners to try.
Beans, lettuce, peas, peppers, and tomatoes are all excellent types to
try if you are just starting out. I
actually happen to be trying to grow all of these veggies this year. YAY!
I took my Cowboy and we went to the store looking for
heirloom seeds and much to my dismay no packages said “we are heirlooms”. My sweet supportive Cowboy helped me pour
over seed racks in a variety of stores checking the backs of packages and
trying to figure out which of these seeds would satisfy me. Talk about an
obstacle, all I wanted to do was grow some heirlooms and I couldn’t even find the
dang seeds. After driving all over town, and feeling quite discouraged, I
consulted the internet for some knowledge (which if I had done in the first
place would have saved me a lot of trouble, I know, but that is not how
impulsive go-getters do their gettin’).
I discovered several key facts:
If it does not say “FI Hybrid” it’s open
pollinated.
ALL Heirlooms are open pollinated. Not all open
pollinated seeds are Heirlooms.
Ok, that cleared up a LOT of questions in my mind when I was
standing in the seed aisle of Home Depot, but regardless of the Hybrid versus Open
Pollinated seeds; I still had a big question of how to acquire open pollinated
heirloom seeds. Oh thank Internet for
being oh-so-made for these types of dilemmas.
And very importantly, I also confirmed that the seeds that I
thought were heirlooms that I got from Seed Savers Exchange at Whole Foods ARE
heirlooms! seedsavers.org
This was the best news of all, since I already had some of these seeds, and I
could easily get more.
In this process I also learned that for my small backyard
garden, heirloom tomato seed saving might not be practical since I intend to
plant several varieties of plants in a small space. The seeds I “save” and am growing this year I
actually saved from some tomatoes I bought at Whole Foods on sale to eat because
the drought last summer was so rough on my tomato crop that I barely got any
fruit. However, I did come across a
great resource, seedsave.org which had a ton of practical and well
organized information and instructions for saving the seeds of different types
of vegetables. Book marked! A book that
I came across during my research called Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth is
going to go on my wish list so that I can really educate myself on this stuff. Seed saving has been like most things in my
life where I just follow my gut first and then learn for to actually do it
later.
After all this internet reading, my conclusion is that if I
want to do this, I need to focus on choosing heirloom seeds to grow, collecting
heirloom seeds for the future from reputable sources, and when I am only
growing one variety of a plant that won’t cross pollinate, then saving the
seeds. So this unfortunately rules out
saving my tomato seeds (and tomatillos because they are similar to tomatoes),
because I intend to grow several varieties. However, I am planning on a couple of other
plants for which I will only plant one type and for those I can save the
seeds.
Plants with seeds I want to save:
Pepper, chili de agua
Pepper, green bell (I am growing this on the
other side of the yard, so I think it will be ok)
Peas
Beans (apparently beans are super difficult to
cross pollinate because of the way the flower is formed, I did not know!)
Squash
Okra
Nasturtium
Marigold
Garlic (garlic grows basically wild in my
garden, thanks to my awesome grandmother, so I put it on this list but it does
not require much work from me)
My bench mark for success in this
goal will be met if I save even just a handful more seeds this year, plant them
next spring, and I start to educate myself about the science of seed saving and
cultivation of heirloom plants.
Seriously, success will taste like putting that first chili pepper on my
burger this summer and thinking about how it came from a seed from a pepper I
grew last year. I might even do the awesome dance.
