Green Gardening: Starting your seeds with What?? Egg Cartons

As you may have figured from my thematic posts regarding green gardening, I've been a little nutso about cheap and green methods.  This one was suggested to me by a friend, and since I had a bunch of egg cartons hanging around for another project, I figured I could use one or two for this experiment as well. 

It's pretty straight forward, just put dirt in the egg carton and you're good to go!  I'd recommend only using the cardboard type, as this will allow for proper drainage for your soil.  Another thing I would recommend, because these dry out so easily, is to put them in a tupperware or other plastic receptacle and pour the water in it, and let it soak up through the bottom of the egg carton.  Seeds seem to like indirect moisture better than having it dumped straight onto the soil, and this seems to work better with this method.

We didn't start many plants in these this year, as I've been pretty obsessed with my Newspaper Seed Starters, but the ones we did are looking ok.  I'm going to have to either transplant them or get them in the ground soon, though, in order to keep them alive.

Have you done any green seed starting this year?  If so, let me know!  I would love to hear about all your trials, even if they're failures! :)

Green Gardening: Starting Seedlings with What?? (Toilet paper tubes)

So as I've mentioned before, this year I'm trying to be "green" with my gardening.  I've already told you how eggshells can be used to start your seedlings, now here's another tip for you!!!

All you'll need for this is to save some toilet paper tubes and keep around a small container that you don't care about.  In this case, I used an old Glad Ovenware that I had bought and lost or destroyed the lid to.

First, you'll cut your toilet paper tubes in half, like this:

Then you'll set them in the container like this:

Then, go ahead and fill them with your seed starting mix!  After this is done, I add water, but not directly to the dirt, but to the outside of the container surrounding the little tubes.  The water will soak up through the toilet paper tubes and into the dirt. 

After everything looks like it's moist, go ahead and plant your seeds!  When you're ready to plant, you can either choose to leave the toilet paper tube in place or just rip it and it will come right off.  I'm going to take mine out only because I don't know how fast they'll decompose.  Perhaps I'll leave one or two as an experiment. :)

Are you a "green gardener"?  If so, share your tips!  We would love to experiment with more green gardening!