Saturday, April 10, 2010

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! 

3 comments:

  1. Paper pots do work well. I used them one year and they were very good but lately I just reuse my 3.5 inch square black pots over and over again.
    I used a vitamin bottle which gave a standard height and dia. and a little piece of masking tape to keep them from opening up. I could put about 6 or 7 in a 4l ice cream pail and they were ready to carry to the garden.
    Nice reminder.

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  2. We re-use plastic pots and flats continuously - but they are not appropriate for the brittle plants. That's why we love a compostable, biodegradable pot without using peat!

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  3. Have you tried corn? The year I did a bunch of these, I also did corn so that they were about 4" to 6" high when I planted them. I thought it worked not too bad but I used too thick of paper for the pots. Also grew my melons,squash, cucs and a few other things as well. For some it was good and others so, so.

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