Since the growing season has finally started again, this week’s blog post will be about urban farming and will show you how you can easily make some paper plant pots yourself. All you need is some old newspapers or similar paper, a small tin or cylindrical object and some scissors. These paper plant pots are ideal for your seedlings since they can stay in their paper pots when it is time for transplanting and repotting – when the paper rots, it will add some nutrients (carbon) to the soil.
Cut the newspaper or packing paper into small strips – they ought to be a bit longer than your tin or cylindrical object.
Wrap the paper strip around your tin.
Now fold the bottom end of your paper tube inside around the bottom of your cylinder. Remove the tin.
Stand your paper tube upright on the table and fold the upper edges of the paper tube inside – the folded edge will give your paper pot stability so that you won’t need any glue.
Repeat with as many paper strips as you want. When you have made enough, put your paper pots into a waterproof tray, e.g. an old plastic tray for vegetables from the supermarket, etc.
Fill with soil for seedlings, water the pots, add seeds and wait for your seedlings to grow into small plants. 🙂 When it comes time to transplant and repot, just take the paper pot and put it into the new big pot or your garden soil – when the paper rots, the carbon in the paper will act as fertilizer for the soil. Happy growing!! 🙂
Since the planting season has finally begun again, this blog post will show you how you can fertilize your plants organically using simple household ‘waste’ 🙂 .
So what kinds of household ‘waste’ can you use as fertilizer for your veggies and fruit and other plants? Here are a few examples:
coffee grounds or tea bags – just mix it into the soil around your plants or put on top of the soil. Both are rich in phosphorus, nitrogen and potassium. To avoid them getting mouldy, best dry them before you give them to your plants.
tank water from aquatic pets like turtles or fish – rich in nitrogen and other substances. Just pour your plants with it! 🙂
ground eggshells – rich in calcium which increases the pH-value of your soil and neutralises acids in the soil.
finally, banana peels and onion skins – both contain potassium and magnesium. Just cut the banana peels into small slices and mix with the soil, or shred the banana peel.
Do you use any other non-toxic household products as a fertilizer? Tell us about it in the comments! 🙂
Today’s blog post is about urban farming and how to grow food on a budget as growing food does not have to be expensive. 🙂 You can grow some food virtually everywhere, even on the smallest windowsill or balcony, e.g. some herbs in pots on your kitchen counter or windowsill or some strawberries, which tolerate even north-facing and shady locations. There is not even any need to buy expensive pots or tools or even special seeds, nor any fertilizer! 🙂 Just take what you have at hand and use or repurpose it for gardening and growing some fresh organic, local crops.
Containers: You can take virtually any container you can find, e.g. the plastic boxes food is sold in in supermarkets, old plastic bottles whose top you can cut off and which you can hang between the slits of your balcony fence, plant pots of any type, old bowls or cups, or you can grow food in plastic or fabric bags filled with soil, etc. You can even grow food in baskets when you put a waterproof cover inside first 🙂 .
Seeds: You can either buy some inexpensive seeds, or you can simply take the ‘free’ seeds from inside the vegetables you buy at the grocery store, e.g. those inside tomatoes or bell peppers. 🙂 This is especially useful if you buy organic vegetables and fruits anyway, because then you can be sure that the seeds have not been tempered with or been modified somehow. If you buy seeds, pay attention that you don’t buy ‘F1’-varieties, because you won’t be able to save seeds from the veggies you grow then, because the plants you grow from them would not have the same properties as the parent plant. (If you don’t care about the properties of the parent plant variety you can use them for growing new plants, of course). Choose organic seeds or heirloom seeds wherever possible. They are – often considerably – more expensive, unfortunately, but they will contribute to maintaining biodiversity and counteract the homogenization of seeds because nearly all conventional seeds sold are of the same varieties nowadays, and are produced by just a few very big seed producers. Much biodiversity was lost because of this, about 80% of heirloom seeds or even more that were perfectly adapted to different climatic conditions….
Growing food from scraps: Another ‘free’ method of growing food is to regrow it from food scraps. You can take virtually take any ‘bottoms’ from veggies that have still the remains of roots on them, e.g. onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, lettuce, etc. Just take the bottoms and put them into the soil, and they will regrow roots and produce greens again, which you can then harvest 🙂 . You can even grow pineapples in pots: just put the green top in a glass of water until you see it regrowing roots, then transplant it into a pot with soil 🙂 . You can even get a ‘second helping’ from chicory stalks: even though they won’t regrow roots, if you lay them in a pot of soil *lengthwise* and cover them lightly with some dirt, they will produce some new green leaves which you can harvest before they die off (caution: if you put them into the soil upright, they will just rot!)
shallots regrowing from scraps
Fertilizing your plants: You can use old coffee or tea grounds as a fertilizer, just put it on the soil around your plants. Another method is to water your plants with tea occasionally, e.g. nettle tea or camomile. Or pour your old coffee into your plants. 🙂 If you have a fish tank, you can take its water to fertilize your plants with its dissolved nutrients. Likewise, when you wash your lettuce or salads in a bowl, don’t pour away the greenish water into the drain but water your plants with it. If you eat organic bananas, you can chop up their peels into small pieces and mix them into the soil around your plants. Also mixing in some scraps of brown paper or cardboard into the soil from time to time can help keep your plants and soil fertile.
Space: You don’t need to have a lot of space for urban farming either – just use any available space you have at your disposal, e.g. your balcony, windowsills, kitchen counter, a roof, etc. Also think about all the space you have, which includes the air space above any pots: you can easily hang up some growing baskets from the ceiling and grow some low plants, like herbs or strawberries, or some vines, like e.g. cucumbers, in them. Or put up some trellises on the walls and grow some beans or similar vines. If you have a small tree or other plant that grows on a stem, you can grow lower plants, like lettuce, herbs or strawberries, in the soil around the stem in the same pot. Use companion planting to find plant combinations that grow well together in a location.
Tools: You don’t need to invest in any special tools either if you just cultivate some containers – just repurpose some objects or tools you already have. For example, you can water your plants with any container that holds water, e.g. old bottles or cups, buckets, and you can dig in the earth using old cutlery like spoons or forks or use a small bowl for moving larger amounts of soil. You can use small, old dead trees or branches as trellises or any sticks you can find, or you can put up some strings for your vines to hold onto. 🙂
Today’s blog post is about urban farming, one of our favorite activities throughout the year, and specifically about growing strawberries, because these are grateful little plants that you can grow almost anywhere, even on shady north-facing balconies and window sills. 🙂 Growing strawberries yourself will save lots of food miles and reduce your carbon footprint, as well as being fun to watch and saving money.
Strawberries are best bought as fully grown plants, since they are difficult to grow from seeds as they are bi-annual, which means that in the first year the plant just grows leaves, and only produces fruit from its second year on. Growing from seeds is certainly possible, but requires patience for at least 2 years. From experience, we can say that there is little difference in quality between plants bought cheaply in trays of 6 at the supermarket and expensive ones from the garden center. By the latter, we have repeatedly been deeply disappointed: we occasionally bought more expensive strawberry plants from the garden center in the hope of getting more robust plants with better yields, but in our experience these plants were often less robust and yielded less than the cheaper ones from the supermarket! So if you buy new plants, you can take those cheaper plants in good conscience. 🙂
Things to keep in mind when buying strawberries: It is best to buy strawberry plants from as many different varieties as are offered or that you can find, but avoid buying plants that are all of the same variety. The reason for this is that you don’t know which variety will do well in your microclimate on your balcony, window sill, roof or garden, and when you have strawberry plants of different varieties, some will always be among them that will do well, whereas others might simply not like your microclimate and will wilt or not carry a large yield. The second reason for investing in different varieties is that strawberry plants of one variety tend to bloom, flower and yield fruit at the same time, and if you have just one variety, you will get a large yield for some weeks, but then nothing at all for the rest of the year. However, if you have several varieties, the plant varieties will flower and bear fruit more gradually over the whole growing season.
You can expect a yield of about 5 to 8 small strawberries per plant per season (average for a north-facing location). Strawberries which you grow yourself are usually smaller than those you buy at the market or supermarket, but they will be even more delicious as you can harvest them at the perfect time when they are fully ripe, and your own strawberries won’t be full of water like those that are sold either.
Strawberries can be grown just about everywhere: you can grow them in pots or even in a hanger on the wall, and they also grow well in shady and north-facing locations, so they are perfect even for small urban window-sills and balconies. 🙂
To fertilize your plants organically, just put some coffee or tea grounds on the soil around the plants from time to time or you can also cut up or shred banana peels and mix them into the soil. Or occasionally water your plants with nettle tea. 🙂
The plants will give a good yield for about 2 to 3 years, after that you will need to replace them.
And if you have any turtles or tortoises, they will just love them 😀 .
EcoTurtleUpcycling & Zero Waste 