Plastic pots can be reused every year that you sow your plants and they store well in outdoor conditions over winter. However, the initial cost can be quite high when first starting out and could even put growing your own veggies out of financial reach. We have been buying a few pots each year to grow our collection, but this year we wanted to see what savings we could make without buying more. So we had a little root around to see what we could use from things we had on hand.

The first stop was contacting the really lovely ladies at our local shop (lanthandel, in Swedish). They have an excellent deli counter with a lot of things made on site so they use a lot of eggs and had lots of empty cartons for us. We have experimented with cabbage seeds in the indented bottom halves. We have 6 savoy cabbages and 6 chinese cabbages. We have had a high success rate using cardboard egg boxes and most of them have sprouted.

When Hatti planted them out she said she was impressed at how easily she could tear the wet cardboard to separate them. She was also super excited to see the root system growing straight through the box.

Go ‘egg box method’!

You could also try asking your local shop to keep any plastic trays in which they sell herb plants. We made small holes in the bottom using a soldering iron. It was quickly done but if you try this you should be careful. It is obviously super hot and can cause damage to people and stuff generally – leave it to a competent grown-up, kids!

These green ‘single use’ plastic trays will be just fine for starting off veggies for a few years to come!

While we are on the subject of making holes in plastic with hot irons, we used this trick to make a gentle ‘watering can’ which can be used to water delicate stems and leaves without damaging them. We soldered a hole in the screw top of a used plastic fizzy pop/soda bottle, filled it with water, replaced the top and the job was done. As the plants get bigger and stronger, you can always make another hole or two to increase the water flow. Again, careful with that incredibly hot iron.

My low cost sustainable ‘watering can’.

Now, onto the bags…

Whilst it has been fun watching how the various seeds get on in their various kinds of ‘pots’, I have to say it was quite a lot of fun making the newspaper bags and Hatti got involved with making a lot of them. She thought it was so much fun that she didn’t want to stop making them even when she was sick with a fever and needed to lie down.

You need just two things…

To make these bags all you need is newspaper and a pot or jar. A cup, or anything with a handle, won’t do. The sides need to be flat to wrap the paper around and form the bag’s shape. The size of your paper and jar will depend on what size you want your bag to be.

We had seeds that either needed to be sown straight into (or eventually moved to) an 8 cm (3 to 3 1⁄2 “) diameter pot so for my bags I used a jar with a diameter of about 6 cm (2 1⁄2”) because that’s what I had at home.

The size of paper will depend largely on the size of your jar. You will want to fold a newspaper page so that the paper is double thickness and creates a rectangle that is long enough to wrap around your jar about one and a half times.

The short end measurement of your rectangle should be no bigger than the height of your jar plus the diameter/width of the neck opening of your jar.

Example: My jar was 4″ (10 cm) tall with a neck opening of 2″ (5 cm), so my paper was roughly 6″ (15 cm) on the short end. The length of my rectangle was enough to wrap around the jar almost twice.

Tip: Be sure to try making one or two pots before committing to the size of paper. You will easily be able to see whether your sizing is working for your jar.

Lay your jar on the folded paper with the fold at the bottom end of the jar and the open sides of paper at the neck end of the jar. Leave about an inch or 2 cm of the bottom end of the jar showing (not covered by paper). Paper should overhang the neck end of the jar. You can see this in the first picture below, as demonstrated by Hatti.

And there you have it! A no-cost seed sowing bag made by you!

It is absolutely fine if you find you have a hole at the bottom of your pot, and equally fine not to have one at all!

One of my favourite things about these bags is that they can be planted directly into your veggie bed and there is no need to turn them out of the bags or peel the paper away and expose the roots to sunlight, which they hate.

Good luck with your planting project!

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