The Seeds Are Sprouting!

My tomatoes and onions are coming up!! Last night there were no signs of life yet in the tomatoes but look what I just discovered!

And my onions have been sprouting for about a week now too! 🙂

I’m so excited! 🙂

Starting Seeds

This afternoon I started a bunch of tomatoes, peppers, onions, rosemary and lavender seeds. I am SO excited to finally be getting started on my garden! In the first week of April I will be starting a lot of other seeds including flowers for the landscape. This is the first year I will be able to grow my own garden without sharing the space with someone else, so I am really excited. 🙂 I ordered all of my vegetable seeds from Baker Creek Seed Company. They are heirloom and organic. My plan is to save my own seeds this year so I don’t have to keep buying new ones every Spring.

In an effort to save money on flats I have been saving egg cartons and paper towel rolls. The paper towel rolls didn’t stretch quite as far as I thought they would but I think I should be able to save up enough in the next couple weeks for the next batch of seeds 🙂 The undivided trays are my onions. I definitely didn’t have enough egg cartons to put one onion in each cell so I just sprinkled them in the boxes. Onions don’t take up much room anyway and they should be easy to separate when they start to grow.
I always get impatient when I’m waiting for seeds to sprout because I want to SEE progress! I’ve even been known to dig up a seed to see if the roots are growing yet. lol This year I’m going to try to be more patient. 😉

In order to keep the cats from walking on and in the seeds I set them up in the guest room, which we don’t really use right now. Josh had a roll of plastic in the garage which I used to protect the carpet and since there are two windows in that room I don’t think I’ll need to use much artificial light.

I can’t wait for them to sprout!! 🙂

Compost Container That Locks in…. Nastiness

Well I started a compost pile a few weeks ago and after my husband caught a whiff of the very unpleasant smell of food scraps coming from under the kitchen sink where they were waiting to be taken outside, I knew I had to make a change. Since it’s winter, I don’t really want to go trudging out to the compost pile every time I have some scraps, so I needed a container that would keep the stink in. 😉 Now I know this is no genius idea, but it was free and it works GREAT! I’d been saving our empty maxwell house coffee containers because they seemed like they could come in handy and I thought about the advertisement that says the lid “Locks In Freshness” so I thought perhaps it would lock in nastiness as well! 😉 No more nasty smells coming from my kitchen cabinet! These containers also work well for keeping my homemade laundry detergent dry.

Does anyone have other suggested uses for these containers? Have you thought of any other clever ways to reuse things around your house?