I Wet My Plants

There are a wide variety of containers you can use for sowing seeds.  The in-store products are peat pellets, peat pots, root trainers, air trainers, self-watering seed starters and more.  The DIY groups may have eggshells, yoghurt containers, aluminum trays, Dixie cups, newspapers rolls, etc.  There are pros and cons for each of them.

Peat pellets stunt root growth, peat pots dry out too quickly, root and air trainers are costly, eggshells are too small, newspaper rolls break apart.  I decided to purchase:

• four forty-pot flats (no dome) from Lee Valley Tools,
• four trays with clear domes from Home Depot and a local nursery,
• a pack of 3.5 oz soft plastic Dixie cups from Wal-Mart,
• eight jumbo square pots, and two traditional bulb pans from Ritchie Feed and Seed.

I used the Dixie cups to start off my lettuce and Brussels sprouts.  I then used two of the forty-pot flats to start off my tomatoes, cauliflower, broccoli and peppers.  I used the jumbo square pots for my dahlias and the traditional bulb pans for my freesias.  Some of the dahlia bulbs were quite long and didn’t fit into the jumbo square pots so I recycled a 1 L pot I had from last year and also cut up a 1 L plastic bottle of apple juice.