I know inevitably I’ll buy plants this spring – like some people have a weakness for shoes or records, mine is plants. I can never have too many plants and I don’t always think through how appropriate they are for our climate, and I’m not allowed to have indoors plants due to allergies. (Excepting the bathroom – and you know what? If I can’t have a kitten I’m going to have a plant in the bathroom and it will love me. Fluffykins is adorable and may or may not be a cyclamen.)

But I digress. Last season I noticed that the tomato plants I purchased really struggled – where as the tomato seeds from compost (accidentally planted so to speak) grew really well – everywhere. Except the veggie garden…

This bought me around to try growing more plants from seed this year and learn the zen patience that comes from that process. I’m still learning the patience…

Even though in Canberra we are having one of the coldest Augusts in over 20 years, it’s time to start sowing seeds outside (onion, kale etc) and starting to grow seedlings somewhere warm – in this case, my bathroom.  (it’s a good look, deodorant, hairspray, bulb, sunscreen, jalapenos….) Turns out my bathroom is the shangri-la for seedlings and in only a week they’ve out grown their communal pots so I need to move them to something bigger.

As I am a) cheap, b) trying to up-cycle and reuse this year and c) lazy I’ve decided to go with newspaper seedling pots.

This is a great video about how to make pots from newspaper  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dlGQP81yfo  and is the technique I used. I took home old papers from work, and this means I can just plant the pots directly into the ground when they get bigger. (that’s the lazy part)

Growing from seed is more cost effective, and I can also minimize the trauma to the plants as transport is kept to a minimum. They will also acclimatize to our immediate micro-climate hopefully improving their rates of survival.  Where I can I’m taking the seeds out of my vegetables and I’ll try to grow plants form those… see how we go I guess.

In the meantime, Fluffykins can bond with the jalapeno seedlings in the bathroom.