Rock Maple Pot Maker

Paper pot maker for starting seedlings. A great gift for any avid gardener. Why buy flats and single use seed starting pots from (non-renewable) peat when you can make hundreds of them out of yesterdays newspaper for free?! – especially when you use leftover scraps of other projects to make one! – yet another cousin of my Pub table)

Just wrap a strip of newspaper around the base, fold, crimp, fill and plant. Start your seeds indoors and you just transplant the entire paper pot to the garden, they won’t start to biodegrade until they are planted in terra firma. You may have seen these in a catalog or online, mine however has a slight taper rather than straight sides to make for easier removal and speedier production.

Beautiful and functional, made out of rock maple (the top is laminated from 3 pieces of 4/4) ... so despite the desire to put it up on a shelf, it is made to be used. The top is about 4 inches tall, 2 1/4 diameter. The base is just under 1” thick, approx 2 1/2+ diameter.

(The folks at Seeds of Change claim to have made over 100 paper pots in an hour with one of these. It probably took me about a minute to make the three pictured.) Sanded smooth and finished (buffed) with bowling alley floor wax – I may reapply as/if neccessary – or let it develop a nice patina with use. Either way this is sure to provide a nice starting bed for many decades worth of seedlings. (All future GardenTenders posts! I’m so ready to get my garden going again.)

This is Mark 2 of the project that launched 1000 bowls! (ok, I rounded up from three, but there will be more!) The base was my first successful attempt at faceplate turning. Mark 1 (as mentioned in this post) took all afternoon to figure out, this puppy took an hour or so.

This is the 17th item in my 30 day project/challenge
& auction.

-- I am always doing what I cannot do yet, in order to learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso -- http://blanchardcreative.etsy.com -- http://snbcreative.wordpress.com/