We Love This Gadget!!

If you like to recyle, re-use, save money, save the planet, upcycle, be thrifty - any of these things, well, the Pot Maker is for you.  You can make your own pots using this device and the newspaper!!  Some plants require a long growing season, which we do not really have in Manitoba.  So, we start them early, inside, to give them all the time they need to bear their fruit.  Some, like watermelon, cantelope and winter squash, are quite brittle and do not transplant well.  So, we start them in pots that can be planted directly into the garden.  We might have used peat pots, but we question how sustainable peat moss is:  it takes thousands of years to make and we're going through peat bogs rather quickly so........we're bound to use it all up.  We've had this little device over a decade, and it's having a bit of a renaissance!  Suddenly, this year, it's in tons of seed catalogues and gardening supply catalogues after being a little hard to locate for a few years.  It's easy - you take a strip of newspaper and wrap it around the handle, then press it into the base to 'crease' the paper into shape.  The shape holds amazingly well; if we hold seeds in these pots for seven or eight weeks due to bad weather, a few pots will be falling apart.  We simply scoop it up, paper and all and plant.  Most newspapers these days are printed on unbleached paper using veggie or soy inks and are quite safe.  We wouldn't recommend using shiny, highly finished or highly coloured papers, which will have more chemicals in them.  It's a great investment!