Monday, June 20, 2011

Easy Seedlings on a Balcony

Container gardening on your porch or balcony doesn't have to be a chore, or a seemingly daunting task. You and your little one(s) can do what I did and take it slowly at first.

Starting your plants off as seeds is the more economical (and educational) way to go about doing it.

Here's how we did it:

Get some plastic wrap, scissors, seed starter, seeds, and a used cardboard egg carton.


Cut the top off the egg carton and save it.


Cover the top in plastic wrap and place the bottom on top of it.


Put in the seed starter.


Put your seeds in and label them.


Keep them moist for the next 24 hours. Water from the bottom up. Take a water bottle and water in between the egg carton layers, making sure only the top layer gets wet. The bottom layer is protected from the water by the plastic wrap.


Your seeds should sprout after a 3 - 7 days. When they're ready to move to a bigger container, just tear off the individual portion and plant. Your plant will grow its roots through the wet paper.


When ours sprout I'll post more pictures of that, as well as when I transplant them.

Happy gardening!

4 comments:

  1. What a great idea. Going to plant some seeds today. Thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's an awesome idea and so much cheaper than buying all the seed starting kits. I'm going to try this next time. I'm constantly trying to find better ways of starting seeds since I think it's important to know how to start seeds instead of just buying seedlings at the store. This year my method was putting the seeds directly in the pot, covering it with a piece of plastic wrap and using 3 clothes pins spaced evenly apart to hold the plastic in place, hold in moisture yet allow for ventilation since mold has been a huge problem for me in the past when starting seeds. This will be much more efficient for my raised beds when I start them this fall than trying to start everything in pots. lol.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for posting, ladies.

    The really great thing is that once the roots start climbing through the bottom of the carton, you can just cut off one egg indent at a time and put it directly into its new pot.

    Composting is awesome.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Haha, composting is awesome! I'm a huge fan. You're cracking me up.

    ReplyDelete