When it comes to starting your plants, there are a number of things you can use. From peat pellets to reusable starter pots and potting soils, the list is long. The problem is that these all cost money. With the rising costs of just about everything, plant starting materials are also getting spendy. We usually start at least several dozen of each different plant. We do this to ensure that we have enough healthy plants ready for the garden once everything thaws out and warms up enough. To significantly reduce our seasonal garden startup costs, we do two things: First, in the fall, when we've cleared the garden of all the crops, we take a couple 5 gallon buckets, and we fill them with garden soil. This gets stored in our cold room over the winter and becomes next season's "potting soil". This saves us from purchasing expensive potting soil over and over. Second, over the winter, we save ALL our toilet paper and paper towel tubes. We save these because they are made from a light, unbleached heavy paper. They make great compostable "pots" for seedlings. We simply fill them with our saved garden soil, drop our seeds in them and let the seeds do their thing. When the seedlings are ready for the garden, we just plant the whole tube, and we're done. When everything is said and done, we've just saved anywhere from $60 to $100 on plant starting materials. The tubes pictured below are ready for seeds. Just debating what we want to plant this year.

With a new week upon us, I'm curious what everyone else is doing. My Monday is going to be spent computer-shopping. The rest of the week will hopefully be spent creating content for my communities. After spending the weekend fighting my computer to edit video, I have concluded that I have to go laptop shopping. Sadly, I need to get a new machine that has more processing power, more memory and more hard drive space. My current computer was not designed for video editing, and I'm going to burn it up if I keep making it work so hard to do a jobit was never intended for. Wish me luck in finding an affordable machine that will do the job effectively...

I decided to put a pinned post up called introductions so we can get to know each other better. Drop your intro in the comments. I'm looking forward to meeting you.