Poor Richard’s Almanac

Frugal living tip #3. January 19, 2009

Gardeners, listen up! It’s Monday, so it’s time for our weekly frugal living tip here at Poor Richard’s Almanac. We’re all thinking about ordering and starting seeds, or at least dreaming of the 2009 growing season, so our friend Ben thought this was a great time to remind everyone of all the great seed-starting equipment you already have around the house (and a few other gardening staples). Before you spend big bucks on a designer grow-light setup or fancy seed-starting “system,” check these tips out and see what works for you:

Egg cartons. Styrofoam egg cartons make excellent seed-starting containers. Cut off the top, use a nail to poke a hole in the bottom of each egg “cup” in the lower half, fill each “cup” with seed-starting mix, plant your seeds, set the now-planted bottom half in the upturned top half (now a convenient tray), water, and voila! If you have the clear plastic cartons, you’ll get a mini-greenhouse effect for your seedlings. Our friend Ben doesn’t recommend using paper egg cartons to start seeds, but you can still use them to enrich your garden: Cut them up and add them to the compost pile. Don’t forget the eggs themselves, either: Dry the shells, pulverize them in a bag, and add them to your garden beds or compost pile as an “eggcellent” source of minerals for your plants!

Takeout containers. You’ll feel less guilty about splurging on takeout coffee or bringing leftovers home in those Styrofoam “clamshell” containers if you recycle the containers for your seed-starting efforts. Styrofoam coffee cups (again, with holes punched in the bottoms) are great for transplanting seedlings into larger containers as they grow (from, for example, your egg cartons). Best of all, you can write the vegetable or flower, variety, and date of initial sowing and transplanting right on the cup! If the kids love those frozen drinks with the clear dome lids, save the lids and put them on your coffee cups for a greenhouse effect. Clamshells are great for seed sowing. As with egg cartons, cut off the tops to make water-catching trays beneath the bottoms. Poke a few holes in the bottom for drainage, write the seed name and sowing date on the side, fill the container with seed-starting mix, sow the seeds, set the tray on its water-catching undertray under your light setup, water, the end!

Shop lights. Light setup, you say? True, you can spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on specially designed growing setups for plants. Or you can convert that old fluorescent shop light in the garage for seed-starting duty. Our friend Ben has been studying the literature on this issue for a long time, and the consensus seems to be that plain old fluorescent lights in a shop light (about a $20 investment) work just fine. I try to get daylight bulbs, or one warm and one cool bulb, but avoid the pricey grow-light types. My shop lights are on adjustable chains so I can keep them just over the planting medium, then raise them as the seedlings (and, later, transplants) grow so they’re always just an inch or two over the plants.

Coffee and tea. If you use a coffee machine at home, you doubtless have quite a stash of coffee filters (and accumulate a daily mound of coffee grounds). Tea bags can pile up, too. Rather than trashing them, save these garden-friendly waste products for your plants. You can toss the used coffee filters and grounds and/or teabags directly in the compost pile (worms love them, too, if you happen to have a worm composter), or work them into your garden or greenhouse beds if the soil isn’t frozen. But here’s a special tip from our friend Ben: I don’t know about you, but I just hate it when I’m potting up houseplants and other container plants and the potting mix spills out of the bottom of the pot. I’ve used pieces of paper towel and newspaper to cover the bottom of the pots and block the soil fallout, and they work well. But if you have used coffee filters, you can save them and the spent grounds until you have enough for repotting. Dump the grounds out into a container (even a plastic bag) so the filters have a chance to dry out rather than rotting. When you’re ready to replant, put a filter in the bottom of each pot and add those coffee grounds you’ve saved to your potting mix. Perfect!

Newspapers. That reminds me, are you still getting print newspapers? If so, there are better things to do with them than tossing them in the recycling bin. You can put them through your paper shredder or use a scissors to cut them into 1-inch-wide strips to add to the compost bins or use as mulch in your garden beds. (Our friend Ben suggests not only watering them in either case to keep them from blowing away, but topping the newspaper mulch with straw or soil to weight it down and give the beds more eye appeal.) You can tear them to fit and put them in the bottoms of pots as noted above. (Forget the old advice about filling the bottom of the pot with pebbles, it just takes up valuable root space and soil still spills out.) Or you can make your own seedling pots using newspaper and a wooden device that shapes it into pot-shaped containers a bit bigger than egg-carton “cups.”

Cola cloches. Those 2-liter soft drink containers have a place in the frugal garden as well. If you cut the bottoms off, you can use the tops as cloches to help protect transplants from the cold and give them a head start in the garden. (You can also use the bottoms as seed-starting containers after punching holes in them, or perhaps even better, as saucers for pots if you don’t punch holes in them.) Set a cola-bottle “cloche” over each tender transplant in your garden bed. When it’s sunny, unscrew the cap to give heat buildup a chance to vent; on cloudy days, keep those caps on. This technique will help you get a jump on the season, but only if you use clear bottles! Our friend Ben notes that some gardening companies sell screw-on spikes for soda bottles that let you convert them into watering devices. You fill the bottle with water, screw on the plastic spike top, then invert the bottle and shove the spike into the soil beside the plant you want to water. These sets of spikes are inexpensive–just a couple of dollars a set—and they could save you some watering time.

Kitchen scraps. Our friend Ben would be remiss if I didn’t remind everyone of the enormous value of saving your kitchen scraps for your compost bins, earthworm composter, or sheet composting. To avoid problems with rats, dogs, raccoons, and mercy knows what all else digging into your compost, do not compost meat, eggs, dairy products, bones, oil, or fat. Everything else is pretty much fair game. The easiest way to get into the habit is to have a kitchen compost bucket at the kitchen sink so you can toss in veggie and fruit peels and cores, plate scrapings, those coffee filters and tea bags, eggshells, leftover pasta or rice, etc. without having to make any extra effort. True, you can spend big bucks on a fancy ceramic or stainless steel composter to keep on your kitchen counter. But as Silence Dogood notes, who wants to look at compost in the kitchen, however fancy the container? We made our own composter with a plastic container and lid set in an empty plastic spackle bucket that we’d bought at the local hardware store for less than $2. (We think it’s important to have a carrying handle, thus the bucket, but even more important to have a tight-fitting lid!) Our compost bucket sits under the kitchen sink, out of sight but ready to serve whenever food is being prepared.

Old seed. As all seed-starting gardeners know, seed loses viability each year, which gives us all a great excuse to keep buying new seeds like there’s no tomorrow. But that doesn’t mean each and every one of those old seeds is dead. Our friend Ben thinks it’s fun to dump the old seed super-thick in one area of the garden and see how it does. I’ve gotten great mixes of lettuces and other spring greens and radishes doing this. Don’t count on anything: You should still buy fresh seed of the plants that matter most to you. But waste not, want not!

That’s it for today! Please let us know what other ingenious recycling methods you use to save money on your gardening ventures. We know there’s plenty we’re not doing!