Contained Excitement

Lacking space for all the seedlings I’d started, last month I resorted to transferring them to containers. I went out and bought a few pots — some plastic, some biodegradable. However, not wanting to spend much money, I also opted for a little recycling to fill the need. I figure anything holding food or drink should be relatively safe, and therefore used containers for take-out, tofu, yogurt, tomatoes, soy milk, carbonated juice, and SPAM. I thought it would be funny to match up some of the seedlings with the corresponding food product — tomatoes in a tomato clamshell, a soybean in a soymilk carton — and want to do more of that in the future. Putting a Hawaiian tomato in a SPAM tin also seems fitting.

In general — and somewhat lamentably, I guess — plastic seems to perform quite well. The biodegradable pots do not; they dry out quickly, and many of their inhabitants died. Even with plastic pots versus clay ones, plastic seems to do better, although I don’t have a large enough sample size or controls to say that with any certainty.

Today I whittled down the container collection, emptying those that were lagging behind, and taking half a dozen Komohana tomatoes and a couple shishitos to Mom’s house, where I planted them along with fifteen heads of Manoa lettuce. The collection seems more orderly now, but I will look to do more transfers in the weeks ahead.