Sowing for the Seedling Sale

As we did last year, all the PiPS member schools will be getting together to hold a community seedling sale this spring. This time around we’ll have even more schools participating, so Clare has given each school a different list of plants to grow. This means we’ll have the best variety of plants on sale and won’t end up with loads of one thing and nothing of another.

Our list includes pumpkins, squash, beans and sunflowers. The sale is in six week’s time, so we got busy this week sowing our seeds.

This year we are also doing our best to reduce our use of plastic, and set an example to our community, so we’re experimenting with growing our seedlings in compostable punnets. The punnets are made of cardboard like egg cartons, and can be planted straight into the ground, where they will disintegrate allowing the roots of the seedling inside to continue to grow into the soil.

We also checked our pea seedlings in the garden beds and found the slugs had been very busy on them. We realised this was because the seedlings had been trailing along on the ground, making them an easy feast. Clare used some strands of flax fibre that were lying around to tie the seedlings onto the stakes until they’re big enough to climb up them themselves. That should keep them a bit safer!