Gardening Update: Our Homemade Newspaper Pots and More

Back in March, we shared about our 324 seedlings that we planted indoors.  We then shared an update in April and so now we are sharing our May (before planting in the ground) update!

These beautiful flowers and vegetables are growing and growing! We had to transfer them to new pots so that they had more room to grow.  We used old cottage cheese/yogurt containers (the big 32 oz. sizes) old flower pots and our own homemade biodegradable newspaper pots, all sitting on flats of cardboard from previous cans and food.

We do still have these 4 original seed starting trays that we haven’t transferred yet.  Three trays are the flowers and one in the top left is the broccoli, cauliflower and radish.  They will need to be transplanted soon, but they still seem to be okay!

Our tray of carrots, peppers and green onions are still in the original planting tray and I think they may be okay until we plant in the ground in a few weeks.

But as you can see, the rest have been moved to new pots.  It has been a lot of work to find and fit the fast growing ones into new pots and find space for them on the table.

This is the very top of the shelf with the roma tomatoes, green beans, peas (with the straw trellis!) and corn.  They are not under the light as it is the top shelf, which means we are rotating them since we are out of room under the light! But it all seems to be working!

So here’s a close-up of our newspaper pots. These are working very well and I wish I had known about them a few years ago to save money! I previously shared a different version of these, but ultimately decided to make the origami pots.  They are very simple and our 8 and 9 year old were helping out too!

I had a printed instructional on how to make them, but got frustrated as I couldn’t figure it out exactly.  So I headed to YouTube, just like we have suggested when you are wanting to learn something, and sure enough, found a video on it.  The video helped immensely and made it very easy!

Here’s the video on how to make them.  You can even start seedlings in these pots, not just transfer like we did!

Here in a few days, we will start hardening them off but placing them outside for a few hours at a time for them to acclimate to the outside temps and then we hope to plant them in the ground in a few weeks!

How is your garden going?