-No Waste Wednesday- How We Use Insides Of Toilet Rolls In Our Garden

What Did We Do?

First we start by collecting all the inside of the toilet rolls all year round. Usually gives us around 3 a week 150ish over the year. We collect them ready to use in April to plant seeds in that we want to grow a little taller before planting out, like Broad Beans or Sweetcorn.

Little basket by the toilet so it is easy to save them

How Did We Do It?

Clayton our eldest child plants all our seeds so it was interesting how he approached this. Clayton is 14, probably 12 in these photos. He is Non verbal & Autistic. He started off filling them like this, but soon realised as he put them down the soil fell out!

He started to then put all of them in the trays and fill them up like that. You’ll see in the next photos some soil did get in between as he figured it out but it didn’t cause a problem it just got thrown into the planters when we finished planting out anyway.

Clayton filling up the toilet roll tubes
Watering the seeds after sowing

What Did We Plant?

We plant our fast growing, taller seeds in these. Broad beans, sweetcorn, dwarf beans.

Broad Beans
Dwarf Green Beans
Sweetcorn, Dwarf Green Beans & Broad Beans
3 days!!! Yes, 3 days they were busting out!
These grew so fast!
These grew this big within 2 weeks & planted out like this.
Interestingly you can see the sweetcorn in the normal seed tray barley grew whereas the 2 trays in toilet roll inserts grew so fast.

This covers Permaculture Design principle No7. Produce no waste. We aim to reduce as much as we can to produce no waste from what we are consuming. Starting by reducing.

Top 5 Reasons To Try This

1. These are great for growing taller seeds. With that extra height than smaller pots. Also as they are narrower you can get more in a tray too.

2. They hold the water really well to keep the seeds moist and warm!

3. Easy to lift straight into the soil, no teasing roots out of the pots drainage holes! Just make a hole and drop the whole toilet roll & plant into the soil.

4. As you are using the cardboard it’s adding extra nitrogen around the plant into the soil as it breaks down. Total win win

5. As always the best reason. It’s free. It’s being reused-recycled-repurposed.

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This blog is from the No Waste Wednesday Blogs

Other related blogs are:

-No Waste Wednesday-What To Do With All The Little Bits Of Cardboard
-No Waste Wednesday-How We Grow Food in a Vertical Garden Using Milk Cartons On A Fence

Published by buildingafoodforestscotland

Building a Food Forest -Scotland Edwardian 1903 Home & Garden in Scotland Planting With Permaculture Design

3 thoughts on “-No Waste Wednesday- How We Use Insides Of Toilet Rolls In Our Garden

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