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Starting a Garden from Seed in Egg Cartons

May 2, 2012 · 2 comments

Egg Cartons--one Filled with Organic Seed Starter Mix

Planting Seeds in Egg Cartons


I love to recycle and reuse materials I have on hand, so I was especially excited to use egg cartons to grow vegetable seedlings under my grow lights. Thankfully, we use a fair number of eggs in my family, so saving up 6-8 cartons did not take too long.

The first step, of course, is to save your cardboard egg cartons. If you don’t eat eggs, then save other containers you think will work for seedlings. As you can see from the photo, the egg cartons have the advantage of offering a good amount of space to grow without taking up too much space under the grow lights. My neighbor used a plastic cupcake box from the bakery; it came with a lid, which she found useful for keeping seedlings warm. I’ve also used the bottom half of a milk jug to start seeds.

Before using the cartons, I sprouted the vegetable seedlings in plastic sandwich bags. I splashed some water on a paper towel, folded it up, and then placed seeds on it. I then folded the paper towel again so that the moisture would surround the seeds. Once that was done, I slid the paper towel into each plastic baggie and sealed it shut. Most importantly, I labeled everything. (Oh, that is so important.) The weather was still fairly chilly when I did this, so I placed the sprouts-to-be under the grow lights to get a bit of warmth. Other people have had success placing their baggies of seedlings on top of the refrigerator or near a heating source (be careful not to set things on fire, of course!).

Once the seeds had sprouted–this is an excellent way to teach children about how seeds work, by the way!–I filled each space in the egg cartons with seed starting mix. (Please see the photo.) You definitely want to use seed starting mix as opposed to soil from your garden, because the mix will be lighter and allow seedlings to get the air and water they need. Soil from the garden often proves too compacted to allow seeds to grow well. Seed starting mix also contains valuable and necessary nutrients for the tender seeds.

At first, I poured water into the egg cartons cups with a tiny pitcher, but that moved the soil around too much. I found that a spray bottle moistened the soil without disturbing the seeds. Plus, the spray bottle holds more water, so I don’t have to troop to the sink to refill as often. I aim for efficiency when possible.

I hope this post helps you when it comes time to start your own seeds. If you have tips to share, please feel welcome to add them in the comments.

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Living Seed Company Vegetable Seeds

April 22, 2012 · 0 comments

Living Seed Company Seeds

Living Seed Company Seeds

I’ve been meaning to write about The Living Seed Company for quite some time. They offer non-GMO, organic seeds of many heirloom varieties of edible plants. They have taken the Safe Seed Pledge, which is the main reason I purchased their seeds. From their website:

For the benefit of all farmers, gardeners and consumers who want an alternative, We pledge that we do not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds or plants.

The mechanical transfer of genetic material outside of natural reproductive methods and between genera, families or kingdoms, poses great biological risks as well as economic, political, and cultural threats. We feel that genetically engineered varieties have been insufficiently tested prior to public release.

The Living Seed Company offers five seed collections. I purchased the Urban/Small Garden Collection, which contains 13 different kinds of seeds, for $30. The seeds come in small packets inside a resealable foil pouch, and Astrid (one of the founders) said the seeds could keep about four years if sealed inside and kept dry. Inside the pouch, they’ve provided a booklet that describes how to save seeds for the future. I have a lot to learn about saving seeds, so I was thrilled.

This collection contains a wide variety of vegetables (and some with gorgeous names!). Here’s the complete list of vegetable seeds:

  • Merveille des Quatre Saisons Lettuce
  • Lacinto Kale
  • Chiogga Beets
  • Green Arrow Pea
  • Boothby’s Blonde Cucumber
  • Purple Plum Radish
  • Galina Tomato
  • Kentucy Wonder Pole Beans
  • Chantenay Carrot
  • Genovese Basil
  • California Wonder Peppers
  • Yellow Crookneck Summer Squash
  • Bloomsdale Longstanding Spinach

Isn’t that a mouthwatering selection of future food?

Most of the vegetables are not high in calories. To achieve my goal of providing most of our food this summer, I rounded out this summer stash of seeds with German butterball and Purple Viking potatoes from SeedSavers.org (you do not need to be a member to purchase seeds from this organization).

How to Grow Vegetables by John Jeavons encouraged me to think about including calorie crops such as potato and onions. When I made it my goal to provide a lot of our summer foods, i started to think about what foods will fill us up. Cucumbers are fine, but who feels full after eating a cucumber? I enjoyed a long look at the SeedSavers catalog and picked out onions and potatoes.

To be fair, I know that beans provide a lot of calories. However, they do not provide as many calories per square foot as do potatoes and onions. So, that is why I decided I should add more high-calorie vegetables to the mix.

Between SeedSavers and The Living Seed Company, I am feeling well prepared to create a nourishing vegetable garden this summer.

What are your favorite organic vegetable seed sources?

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Summer Vegetable Garden Experiments

March 21, 2012 · 2 comments

Seeds Growing in Egg Cartons

Seeds Growing in Egg Cartons

This past week, I started growing seeds for the vegetable garden in egg cartons I’d been saving. I thought I’d saved too many egg cartons, but I actually could have used more for all the vegetable seeds I have.

This blog is about sharing gardening experiments and to track what I am doing. I need an audience if I am going to track what I’m doing with gardening. Here are a few of mine:

Gardening Experiment 1: Can I get a head start on the weather with grow lights? I ordered grow lights—yep, I could have built them, but I know I’m not handy—which provides two shelves for coddling my little seedings this spring. These vegetable seeds are safe from our resident rabbit for now, and I hope I can keep it that way when I transfer them outside.

Gardening Experiment 2: Which will yield healthier plants? Egg cartons or cow manure pots? That’s right. I have containers made of cow manure, and I can tell you they do not smell that great when you first enter the house. Thankfully, the family has not appeared to notice the slight smell.

Gardening Experiment 3: Which vegetables will grow best in my area? This season, I’ve started chanteray carrots, chiogga beets, maraveille quatre saisons lettuce, spinach, radishes, peas, peppers, basil and tomatoes. I already have kale, rosemary, and Greek oregano from last year. Isn’t it fantastic when the plants return, and you do little to no additional work for their return? I bought seeds from The Living Seed Company.

Gardening Experiment 4: Can I grow fruit trees? I have a newish fig tree, which will soon let me know if it survived winter outdoors. I grew apple tree #1 before realizing it needs a friend. Oops! I added apple tree #2. If nothing happens, I may need to tear them out. A pear tree has been added by my gardening partner. I’m thrilled about this little orchard we’re starting.

Sometimes, I think I am nuts to start all of these, but I have a big goal.

BiG GOAL: To provide most of our summer vegetables.

Do you have a gardening goal? If so, please share in the comments.

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Kitchen Compost Collectors

February 13, 2012 · 4 comments

Compost Bin and Flowers: Not for the kitchen, but I could not resist this photo of flowers with the bin.

Kitchen compost collectors come in handy during the first steps of soil preparation. Collecting kitchen scraps for the compost pile reuses materials and reduces trash sent to the landfill while providing nutrient-rich soil for your vegetable garden (read How to Compost).

Often, people wonder how to collect food scraps for their compost heap in a neat way that won’t smell. Thankfully, the smart community members at the Evenings in the Dirt Facebook page (join us!) offer low cost (okay, cheap!) ways to collect those vegetable/fruit scraps.

Here are some of the imaginative ideas from the Facebook community:

  1. Ice cream buckets
  2. Decorative container with a rubber seal
  3. Glass measuring cup
  4. A crock with a seal
  5. A yogurt container
  6. Collander
  7. Nothing–just throw them into the garden or compost heap
  8. Plastic ice bucket with lid

What other ideas do you have for ways to hold your food scraps for the compost heap?

Please join our Facebook community!

Photo credit: Rose of Academe from Flckr

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Gardener’s Supply: Frost Pop Up Covers

February 12, 2012 · 8 comments

Gardener's Supply Frost Pop Up Cover

With great hope and excitement, I purchased several frost pop up covers from Gardener’s Supply Company. I was thrilled to extend the growing season and to have fresh green produce even in winter, which can be mild in my part of zone 7.

Imagine my annoyance and disappointment when the $40 cover ended up shredding in the wind. I now have to wrangle the entire mess into a trash can and throw it all away. Thanks to Gardener’s Supply, I have unprotected vegetables in my garden and more trash to add to a landfill. (Note: I have not yet contacted Gardener’s Supply and will update this post once I do and once I hear from them.)

This blog is about sharing experiments in the garden with the goal of helping all of us become better gardeners—together. With this lesson, I learned I may as well throw my money into the trash instead of buy these frost covers.

Here’s the link to the frost covers. I see they are on sale now, so maybe others had a similar experience. Although Gardener’s Supply is not listed as the manufacturer, the product is listed as “exclusive” to Gardener’s Supply. The actual manufacturer’s name is either not listed or was, at least for me, impossible to locate.

UPDATED: Gardener’s Supply offered to refund my money for the frost pop up covers. I did not agree with them continuing to sell them and said so. I’ll still buy items from there, but I scrutinize the online reviews for potential problems.

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7 Cheap Gardening Containers

January 30, 2012 · 5 comments

If you like organic container gardening, chances are you like frugal gardening too. On the Evenings in the Dirt Facebook page, we were discussing container ideas. I promised to collect the ideas and put them into a blog post. The ideas don’t have to stop with this blog post. Please add your ideas in the comments.

  1. Coffee Cans: If you buy coffee anyway, this is an inexpensive way to get gardening containers while recycling at the same time. Make holes in the bottom for drainage, fill with good soil, and see what you can grow. By the way, you know those coffee grounds can be composted, right?
  2. Rice Milk Boxes: This idea came from a member of the Facebook page community. Is that not brilliant? Sometimes, I don’t consider the usefulness of items right under my nose. It would be extremely easy to create drainage holes in these.
  3. Gallon Milk Jugs: Once you cut off the narrow top spout, you are left with a wide plastic body. You could sprout quite a few seeds in one of these.
  4. Egg Cartons: I’ve collected about four or five cartons to get my seeds started. I am slicing off the lid and starting seeds inside the egg holders, which will be placed on a tray to catch any water or dirt.
  5. A Potato: Hard to believe? Maybe it’s not exactly a “container,” but you can grow and eat the leaves from the ones that are not toxic such as sweet potato.
  6. An Old Bowl: Although it might be difficult to drill holes to get drainage, you could manage this if you were careful and did not water too much.
  7. Take-Out Boxes: Here’s something you can do with your old Chinese food boxes, folks! Fill them with dirt and grow some food.

Many thanks to Harvest McCampbell for some of these ideas and for these photos of creative container gardening.

What containers do you use for gardening?

5 comments

Finding non-GMO Seeds to Purchase

January 15, 2012 · 3 comments

Monsanto has acquired the majority of the seed companies. You kind of have to wonder why the U.S. government allows this monopoly–allowing one company to have nearly all control over our food supply seems dumb to me–and then you see the FDA hiring former Monsanto employees, and you might figure something bad is going on in the background. I don’t want to support Monsanto, so I’ve been looking for where to buy non-GMO seeds and where to find seeds at companies NOT owned by Monsanto.

First, I tried Seed Savers in Iowa. Obama visited Seed Savers (non-GMO) (see Obama on video here) and then allowed Monsanto to raise genetically modified alfalfa. Oh, brother. Anyway, Seed Savers claims to save and share heirloom seeds. Based on what I’ve seen in the gardening community, Seed Savers is legitimate.

On Twitter, I stumbled across a California-based couple who make heirloom seed varieties available. They sell seeds in “collections.” Their “urban gardener” collection had particular appeal, of course! Since I could not find a way to order on their website, I sent them an email to ask how to order. I will update this post if I receive information about how to order.

The Urban Organic Gardener had an article about finding non-GMO seeds. (Does he have the coolest logo, or what?) He said he contacted Botanical Interests, a company he’d done business with for a while, and asked them about their stance on genetically engineered seeds.

The Botanical Interests company wrote back to say this:

Botanical Interests has signed the Safe Seed Pledge, meaning that we do not knowingly buy or sell genetically engineered seeds. The future of “safe seed” is a concern for all of us in the industry. It is something that we take very seriously and we are constantly monitoring the news and talking with our growers about it.

We support organic growers, and we’ve been selling organic seed since 2001. The organic certification process is an important one that involves many steps: soil testing for pesticide residue, strict guidelines as to soil amendments that can be used (some soil amendments might contain heavy metal residues), and monitoring general farming procedures used. A lot of companies added organics recently because they saw it as a trend, but we’ve been selling organic seed for the past decade.

The Safe Seed Pledge sounds pretty neat. Of course, I will always do additional research to find out what a pledge means and who is behind it. On the surface, this sounds pretty good to me, and I will look into Botanical Interests for my seeds. I will also be learning how to save seeds this year.

I hope you will join me on Facebook. I set up a page so we can continue the conversation!

3 comments

Zone 7 Gardening To Do List

January 12, 2012 · 0 comments

It’s almost time to buy seeds for my growing urban garden. I’ll probably order seeds later this week.

Today, I saw a to-do list for zone 7 garden preparation for January. You can find other zone to-do lists if you go to the link and follow the slide show. They discuss what flowers you can start as seedlings. Of course, I am most interested in creating an edible landscape, so I want to know all about the tasks related to vegetable gardening. These are a few items on the organicgardening.com list:

  • Start cabbage seeds, early lettuce seeds, and at the end of the month, broccoli.
  • When onion and cabbage transplants are available at the garden center, select the best and plant them in the garden under a row cover.
  • Near the end of the month, weed the asparagus bed and strawberry plot, then feed the plants and renew the thinning mulches.

Their list got me thinking about my own zone 7 to-do list, which includes:

  • Clear out the front gardens on a mild day.
  • Map out the vegetable garden. I am looking for an iPad app to help with this.
  • Buy relevant seeds. I am interested in strawberry, daikon, cabbage, broccoli, carrots, peppers, and tomatoes to name a few.
  • Stir up the compost pile. (Did you know you can bake garden soil to remove unfriendly organisms before using it with seedlings?). We have been diligent all winter with saving kitchen scraps, and I look forward to seeing how that helps our garden this year.
  • Prune the fruit trees (I have apple, pear, and fig trees). I’ve been eyeing them from the kitchen window and will soon write a tutorial on how to prune fruit trees.
  • Purchase 1-2 more raised beds to create a place for blackberries or strawberries. The birds planted our blackberries for us. My husband rips them out, but I am persuading him we should roll with nature here.
  • Obtain good soil to start seedlings indoors.
  • Save egg cartons for seedlings.
  • Consider buying grow lights or figure out how to grow seedlings in a sunny window without a family member banging into it and spilling the dirt all over the floor.

What is on your to-do list for the garden right now?

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My 2012 Urban Gardening Desires

January 11, 2012 · 0 comments

A fellow garden blogger inspired this post with his gorgeous list of 2012 gardening goals. Without goals, I lose track of what direction I want to take with my urban garden. I am sharing my goals with you to keep me on track, to inspire you to create your own if you want them, and to have them around for review in 2013:

This year, I will continue to enjoy my mistakes and failed experiments (stay tuned for my posts on The Great Garlic Experiment) and I will write about them so others can learn (or maybe even giggle?) from my mistakes.

When I garden, I am in the moment. I am attentive in a way that’s difficult to achieve in other domains. I will nurture being present and encourage it to expand to other areas of my life.

I will garden and grow vegetables while drinking the occasional cocktail. I’ve never done that before and having a glass of wine in the garden sounds lovely.

I will document what happens in my garden so I can prepare for the following year while tracking the successes and failures I mentioned earlier.

This year, I will sit by the garden more often.

I will set up a trade with a local person. I had way too much of some vegetables in 2011. In 2012, I hope to set up a trade with someone who wants my vegetables in exchange for something I don’t have.

In the past, I’ve focused on growing food to eat. I did not care about aesthetics. While my 2012 garden may not win a beauty contest, I will put more thought into how it looks.

Oh, I will take more photographs! If I had done that before, I would have a better photo to share here.

I will use this blog to connect with others around the country so I can share what I know and learn from others.

Happy new year!

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Harvesting in the Vegetable Garden

October 3, 2011 · 0 comments

For the longest time, I waited for the harvest. The Big Harvest. Before I knew anything about gardening, I figured I’d plant vegetable seeds around the same time and harvest around the same time.

Instead, I harvest every other day. This is better than I imagined it.

I know there must be exceptions for berries and other grown foods. For hearty vegetables like kale and chard—and even early fall lettuce—I harvest when I am hungry.

Because I garden for myself, I don’t have to harvest all at once to get the crop on a truck to be taken to grocery stores.

One time, my father-in-law said he needed to get lettuce. He ran out the door and returned in five minutes. Knowing they live nowhere near a store, I asked him how he got the lettuce so fast.

“The garden,” he said.

That moment was a revelation to me. All my life, I’d mostly eaten food from restaurants and grocery stores. Without knowing it, I was depending on grocery stores for 100% of my food needs. My father-in-law made me realize I, too, could walk into the back yard to harvest food if only I learned how to grow it.

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