We made a quick trip to one of the garden supply stores yesterday to pick up some seed starting pots. I tried the toilet paper tubes for the second year and found them messy and disappointing. Last year I decided to be frugal to the extreme and cut the tubes in half before cutting and folding the bottom. They provided too little space for good root development. I used the full size tubes this year but a couple of the tubes came apart when the soil was moistened. I hadn't planted anything when it failed so no loss there. Just irritation at the mess. I did get four tubes planted with Ox Heart tomatoes before switching to the few pots of the 2" size I kept from my cleaning and purging efforts over the last month. I will keep the seedling pots I get this year for seed starting next year. If by some evil chance I can't get (or can't afford) whatever new pots I might need, I will go back to making the newspaper pots. They worked fairly well.

However, today I plan to get the third variety of tomato, the two cucumbers, and the eggplant started in the new pots which are biodegradable (I hope!!) and continue clearing the file cabinets of extraneous paper. I hope the temperatures will remain high enough to thaw the soil for the second time. The gardens were thawing out nicely with that heatwave we had when the temps reached the high 50s and low 60s for about a week but refroze quickly with the low temps and snow of the last couple of weeks. We picked up five new 5 gal. buckets along with the starting pots. Those will replace the 30 gal. tub that has split. I want to transfer the soil from it to the buckets directly and I need to be able to get a shovel into the soil to do that. I also want to move the shepherd's hook from the pots to try a new spot for them where they can be anchored to the fence. I hope it works. Again, I need softer ground to set the hooks in place.

John Feffer has a nice short fiction about how the #45-Kim summit might go, if it goes. Good for a chuckle.

I checked the soil in the gardens and it is all hard as ice. Frozen clear through. Oh, well--at least I can still dream of what will eventually go in them. I got all of the large plants seeds started. Just in case I started two more pots with Ox Heart tomatoes. For some reason my Ox Heart seeds failed last year. I have a nice selection of Vernissage tomatoes, Roselle tomatoes, Mitoyo eggplant. I knew I was forgetting something--I forgot to take out the peppers. I will get them done tomorrow.