Making Paper Pots for this Year's Plants

Time to start the squash and bitter melon seeds! An easy and inexpensive way to start seeds is to use paper pots. But unlike the linked instructions I find using a right-sized soup can instead of a jar works just fine. And instead of just bunching the left over paper into the end, just make four cuts and fold each section in, taping the final section down.

You can also see we have little starter pots. These we got from Fred Meyers, called "Jiffy Discs" (I think). These are for the special seeds we got from "Pepper Bob" (Mom and Dad's neighbor). Pepper Bob is most protective of his special tomatoes but because Annie is so cute, this last summer PB gave Annie "one" tomato. Well, we already knew these tomatoes were special so instead of savoring that one tomato I found how to extract seeds (a fun project, really) and dried them. Fingers crossed, we hope that unless the tomatoes are hybrids, we will have our own special tomatoes from now on. (Don't tell Pepper Bob!)

Tomato Seed Starting
Tomato Seed Extracting Pictorial