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I saw one of the threads about paper pots.

The old timers up my allotment used to use loo rolls for their seedlings..

Reg used to swear by them and would get his family collecting them by the sack load over the winter.
He especially favoured them for parsnips and sweetcorn as they hate being transplanted .

Jill..

I might have come up with another use for empty loo roll tubes:-

A slight error in planning my miniscule growing area means that I have no room to plant out my leek seedlings, so I am trying an experiment by keeping them in their tray, and putting a loo roll over each of them, filled with soil, in an attemp to mimic the hole you would normally drop them into.

No idea if this is going to work, or if the loo rolls will survive the season.

You've got nothing to lose by giving it a go. At worst if the loo rolls disintegrate half way through you'll end up with a lot of baby leeks..better than none at all.

Are you going to water just directly to the bottom, or from the top..Decisions, decisions!!

Jill..

At the moment I'm just watering with a hosepipe from the top, but I may need to stop wetting the rolls if this is a problem.

Maybe as you say if you avoid watering the rolls as much as possible they might last a bit longer, and if you can keep them going maybe you could plant them into a bed, albeit a bit later, when something has finished.

I said on another thread about a path I intensely planted many years ago (with success). That came about because I had an allotment in London that I had to give up halfway into the season. So I transplanted all my veg off the allotment into this path we dug up. We even put three rows of bricks, just stacked up, underneath my greenhouse workbench. Filled it full of earth and I transplanted all my baby carrots back in there.

Our next door neighbor "Stan" was like a Harry Enfield character. The one that used to say "If I was being you I wouldn't do that". He said "you can't do that they will die". And yeah we did lose a few, but 80% not only survived but did really well. Even the carrots in the greenhouse, because they didn't have to force their way through the earth, were great.

So the moral of the story is nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Dear old Stan, in the end his interfering drove me so mad, when we built our sons a wooden fort he came out to tell us "you can't build that there", we told him it was going to be a chicken coop...he nearly laid an egg!!!!


Jill..

Glad to see somebody else knows the immense value of loo rolls... I've done broad beans and peas in them in the past, and with that there's another bit of "rubbish" that comes in handy - those plastic punnets you get with fruit (those deep ones without holes - with holes you need a tray underneath). Each holds about 8 loo rolls, they keep them nice and upright even if they get soggy, they fit onto a window sill, and being small, are easily moved if necessary.

No idea why I didn't do that this year - lack of loo rolls wasn't the reason . and my peas might have done better. I'll definitely try it for parsnips and leek next time round, might even get some going now. Thanks for the tip!

Ina