That toilet paper tubes , cut in half , make excellent starter pods ? Put a
bunch of them in a round tinfoil cake pan standing on end , Fill /em with
your choice of soil , and plant the seeds . By the time the plants are
ready to move into the garden the bottom half will be mostly decomposed .
--
Snag



---
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On Tue, 14 Jan 2014 17:19:45 -0600, "Terry Coombs"
wrote:

That toilet paper tubes , cut in half , make excellent starter pods ? Put a
bunch of them in a round tinfoil cake pan standing on end , Fill /em with
your choice of soil , and plant the seeds . By the time the plants are
ready to move into the garden the bottom half will be mostly decomposed .
--
Snag

Interesting. But you should get started now to have enough for next
year.
--
USA
North Carolina Foothills
USDA Zone 7a
To find your extension office
http://www.csrees.usda.gov/Extension/index.html

On 1/14/2014 6:19 PM, Terry Coombs wrote:
That toilet paper tubes , cut in half , make excellent starter pods ? Put a
bunch of them in a round tinfoil cake pan standing on end , Fill /em with
your choice of soil , and plant the seeds . By the time the plants are
ready to move into the garden the bottom half will be mostly decomposed .
--
Snag


That's a great idea. Have to try it.

Derald wrote:
"Terry Coombs" wrote:

That toilet paper tubes , cut in half , make excellent starter pods
? Put a
bunch of them in a round tinfoil cake pan standing on end , Fill /em
with your choice of soil , and plant the seeds . By the time the
plants are
ready to move into the garden the bottom half will be mostly
decomposed .
Yes; I've used them for years. I slip bands cut from (nominally)
28oz plastic coffee containers around groups to keep them together and
stand the whole ball of wax on end in the container's lid. Warning:
The tubes are flat-wound helixes that do not always unwind easily or
disintegrate as readily as one might hope. You may have begun to
notice the "Lifesaver Effect" on toilet paper rolls: That is, the
hole is bigger while the roll appears to be the same size. The
large, thin cores work better than the older "good" ones.


--
Snag



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This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus
protection is active. http://www.avast.com

[OT] BTW: Your sig delimiter is broken. Hyphen, hyphen, space, CR is
what most newsreading software expects to see, although, some also
honors hyphen, hyphen, hyphen, CR. That will spare the group the
Avast spam, if nothing else. No one in his right mind believes it,
anyway. Think about it: Would _you_? :-)

Derald
USDA 9b
Peninsular FL, USA

This comp is still being sorted out - This is my desktop , I left it with
my kids at my house in Memphis "We don't use your stuff." . Pure bullshit ,
they had this thing so eaten up with virii and trojans that I had no choice
but to wipe the HDD install the OS fresh . Actually I swapped in a new
drive so I could salvage most of the stuff on the old one .
I thought the sig delimiter was "space hyphen hyphen ... oh and I turned
that particular annoyance off in the AV program - I think I did anyway .

Terry Coombs wrote:

That toilet paper tubes , cut in half , make excellent starter pods ? Put a
bunch of them in a round tinfoil cake pan standing on end , Fill /em with
your choice of soil , and plant the seeds . By the time the plants are
ready to move into the garden the bottom half will be mostly decomposed .

i've been shredding mine and feeding them to the
worms for the past few years. not thinking i would
be doing seed starting at all anyways. looks like
i might try to find some room here this season and
might have to make do with strips of cardboard slit
up halfway and then interleaved to make cells...


songbird

Derald wrote:
songbird wrote:

looks like
i might try to find some room here this season and
might have to make do with strips of cardboard slit
up halfway and then interleaved to make cells...

The dividers that separate bottles in shipping cartons are nearly
made to order. Check with grocer or a liquor store. I'm fat with
dividers from liquor cartons, if you think they'd work and are
interested, lemme know.

ah, no thanks, i've got plenty of materials here
on hand already to recycle.


songbird

Derald wrote:
songbird wrote:

ah, no thanks, i've got plenty of materials here
on hand already to recycle.

Shoot; and here I was thinking I might have fewer "treasures" to
walk around, move around.

shredded cardboard is one of the best mulches for worm
food. any time we go to a certain store we always scrounge
up free boxes. Ma uses quite a few of certain ones for
things she does. any scraps i shred and that eventually
ends up in the worm farm. within weeks it's gone. a few
box tops i use for drying veggie scraps or projects, after
a while they get beat up so they get shredded and get fed
to the worms. it is a nice system where pretty much
everything eventually gets used or recycled. i line the
box tops with newspapers so they don't get too gunky too
quickly.

today i finished up sorting through quite a few box tops
of garlic from last summer's harvest. the garlic i brought
in a few months ago was sprouting and some of it was starting
to ferment. quite nice smelling. the garlic i brought
in from the garage (where it has been repeatedly frozen and
thawed and generally ignored) is in much better condition.
that was purely accidental as i thought i had brought all of
it in. good thing. perhaps this weekend i'll see if it is
still in good enough condition to put some of it up to hold
us over the next few months. the bucket of garlic that will
get buried deeply this spring when the ground thaws is some
really stinky stuff. wonderful. i had to put it out in
the garage a few minute ago. the lid on that bucket didn't
fit as well as the one i used last night. didn't smell it
at all until i opened it back up today. a whole 5 gallon
bucket of garlic scraps, small heads and scapes. i took
most of the tunics, roots and stems off to use as worm food
as the worms seem to really love it. the roots especially.
i'll have a 5 gallon bucket of those scraps to run through
the wormies the next few weeks. i've never heard a worm
drool.

haha, guess i'm in a chatty mood tonight, but now i'm
tired and ready for a snooze. cold and windy tomorrow.
will hope y'all don't get too frozen by this blast. we
were planning on going out tomorrow, but i think i'll stick
close to home and enjoy a good fat book and this pile of
blankets here in the roost.


songbird

In article ,
says...

You may have begun to notice
the "Lifesaver Effect" on toilet paper rolls: That is, the hole is
bigger while the roll appears to be the same size. The large, thin
cores work better than the older "good" ones.

The width of the roll has gone down too.

Another marketing cheat.

Derald wrote:

Damn! Forgot to _change_ the subject line! Silly old fart....

i didn't know you could do that!

(joke, it's a joke, ok? )


songbird

Derald wrote:
songbird wrote:

cold and windy tomorrow.
will hope y'all don't get too frozen by this blast. we
were planning on going out tomorrow, but i think i'll stick
close to home and enjoy a good fat book and this pile of
blankets here in the roost.

Yep; staying warm. Plenty of firewood on hand, although, not in
the variety I'd prefer. Maybe next year.... Garden doing well. 27°(F)
for about an hour-and-a-half in the small hours of 23 Jan. That was our
first frost, really light, no ice. Wife picked the few peas that were
ready, just in case; needlessly, it turned out. Much warmer now but
wet: Late night sprinkling of rain and then morning fog. Good day in
which to prep a small space in which to transplant some collards that
need some elbow room and to replace some volunteer deer's tongue
seedlings with lettuce.

glad you made it through the first blast ok, i sure
hope this latest doesn't wind it's way down there.
i miss the little fellers here, i.e. pea plants, they
just seem to be rather cheerful plants to me.


Garden first-timers this fall are bok choy, celery, broccoli raab
(rappini), two additional varieties of carrots, and one of lettuce.
Don't know what to expect from any of the first three. Will continue to
succession plant them, possibly as late as April or May.

if the raab is anything like the plant i had growing here
that was leaves/stems and nothing else, it grew great, got
to be as large as the neighboring soybean plants, but i had
no idea what it was, and then the aphids decended upon it
and i finally gave up and removed it.


songbird

Derald wrote:
songbird wrote:

if the raab is anything like the plant i had growing here
that was leaves/stems and nothing else, it grew great, got
to be as large as the neighboring soybean plants, but i had
no idea what it was, and then the aphids decended upon it
and i finally gave up and removed it.

The stuff I have appears to be some kind of mustard. It's about
1012" tall. Time to plant more. This is my first time and I'm waiting
to see whether it's what I've been buying as "rapini" at the food store.

how long has it been growing?

i'm also assuming that you must like it if you've
determined to plant more already.


songbird

Derald wrote:
songbird wrote:
Derald wrote:

The stuff I have appears to be some kind of mustard. It's about
1012" tall. Time to plant more. This is my first time and I'm waiting
to see whether it's what I've been buying as "rapini" at the food store.

how long has it been growing?

The first was direct seeded on 14 Dec.

this isn't what we had, by two months it
was 18" or taller.


i'm also assuming that you must like it if you've
determined to plant more already.

No: Optimistic!

hahaha, ok...


it doesn't take much space or time to drop in a
few seeds every couple of weeks and I'll have an idea from the get-go
about how late it may be planted. We're pretty far into the "spring"
brassica planting time, in these parts. May have 'til the end of this
month.

we gotta pile of snow to melt here, i sure hope
it doesn't all go at once...


songbird