Winter sowing

On Tuesday Nov 20, 2007, Kylee of Our Little Acre, brought up a term I had not heard of before. Winter sowing. This idea intrigued me enough that I followed her link back to another of her posts from January 14, 2007 where she describes how this thing works.

It is such a surprisingly simple idea that makes use of an item, plastic milk jugs, that almost everyone has in their kitchen and gets thrown out when they are emptied.

I put them into the recycle bin and know they get re-used somehow but if I can re-use them myself, all the better. I have saved a few of them to use as cloches, which work pretty well, but after seeing this idea I can now use more of them as mini-greenhouses as well.

The idea probably won’t replace my indoor seed-starting setup but it will sure give me more space to start even more.

I’m going to set my jugs in the raised beds which are currently covered in about 6” leaf mulch. The mulch should give the little greenhouses a bit of extra protection from the cold. Plus, with the jugs being filled part way with soil, they will provide extra protection for the raised beds. I love this idea!

Now I can start those sweet peas that my wife loves so much. I haven’t had any success starting them early enough and this just might work. Also, there are a bunch of other seeds I could start and haven’t because of limited space, like cosmos, lithianus, zinnias, candytuft, and, and... Oh boy, I can see this is going to take up my ‘extra’ garden space pretty quickly. Hmmm, maybe I can find some space in the neighbors beds.

Thanks for enlightening us to this marvelous, simple idea, Kylee.