Winter Sowing Part 1

In my research efforts to try to minimize my risk of failure at starting seeds indoors, I stumbled across a curious concept that I've never heard of but am intrigued by...winter sowing.  Since I have so much time on my hands and nothing better to do but dream up things to keep myself busy with, I just couldn't resist jumping right in and trying it.  I figure with attempting to start seeds both indoors and out maybe I can up my success rate.  Couldn't hurt.

I spent a little bit of time reading around online about it and my darling beloved brought me home some wonderful scavenger treasures and we have begun the experiment!

Steve is so very green and brought me a love offering (which scored major bonus points) of plastic pop bottles and a handy-dandy plastic tray to hold them ever so nicely.  This will be wonderful!

Emily lovingly washed them all for me with some bleach and we let them air dry.  Then we began to have fun.

First we borrowed Jordy's woodburning tool.

 It was handy to use to burn holes in the bottoms of the bottles. 

This was really satisfying to do. It just melted through it so easily it was hard to share and let others have a turn.  It was also quite odiferous.

We also burned some air slits into the tops of the bottles.

Steve taped a Sharpie pen to a ruler for the purpose of making a nice, straight line all around the outside that we could cut along neatly.  He taped the pen at 4 inches up to give us some room for roots to develop down in the soil.

Next we cut the tops off of the bottles with a boxcutter.

We also cut some slits in the top portions to enable us to scrunch the bottle top up to make it fit back on to make the greenhouse effect, but could lift them off when the time comes.

 I enlisted several minions, er, children to cut some coffee filters for me so that we could stick them in the bottoms of the bottles to keep the dirt from going out the holes.

It was a nice and cozy evening working and playing together by the warmth of the pellet stove and it was very nice to all be together.

They cut the ruffled edges off leaving just the bottom, round circles.

It's a rough life being a minion around here.

This is the best part of my blog posts...all the fun pictures of my sweet children!

We then stuffed them down into the bottoms of the bottles. (The filters, not the children.)

This is all we got done that evening and it was already past bedtime so we left the dirty work for the next day.  I will post a Part 2 post with what we did the next day!