I’ve discovered an amazing new way to grow sweet peas that is better for the plants and better for the planet.
I love growing sweet peas and always start them off indoors in late winter/very early spring to be planted outdoors in early May once the weather warms up.
I’m trying to move away from using plastic in my gardening projects but found that cardboard loo roll tubes, often suggested for sweet peas, collapsed too quickly over the course of the six/eight weeks that I grow them on under glass. The tubes and fibre pots on the market had the opposite problem of steadfastly trapping the roots within their walls unless you absolutely drenched them.
So I ran a trial this year to see if I could use Wool Pots for the early stages and pitted them against plastic pots – and the results were fantastic.
I always pre-germinate my sweet peas and I’ve attached a link to the popular sweet pea tutorial we made last year giving step by step instructions, (but this was made before I discovered Wool Pots so please excuse the use of black plastic pots in it !).
The plants in the Wool Pots looked healthier from the outset and the root growth was more evenly spread around the pot, presumably due to the air flow in and out of the woollen walls of the pot. The base and walls of the Wool Pots started to decompose naturally after about 8 weeks but the rootball held together nicely.
The game-changing aspect really came into play at planting-out time because instead of tipping the plants out of pots or root trainers, the whole woolpot is dropped into the ground where the remains of the woollen walls gently decompose to provide an extra little boost of natural fertiliser to the roots.
In comparison, the plants grown in plastic pots had congested roots coiled at the bottom which had to be manually untangled to encourage them to branch out and explore their new environment. This gave them a check to their onward growth and made them slower to establish.
As an extra bonus the rim of the Wool Pot remained intact to provide a natural slug barrier for the young plants.
I was left with not only some great little plants that had the best start in life, but also a clear conscience that I wasn’t adding to the 500 million (yes that’s half a billion) black plastic pots that we take to land-fill each year.
The fact that the Wool Pots are manufactured from sheep’s wool sourced in the UK giving our beleaguered farmers some value to an otherwise wasted by-product was the final reason that I intend to use Wool Pots for my sweet-peas from now on.
Click on the box below to watch a short video of the Wool Pots in action:
And here is the original tutorial we made on growing sweet peas but please substitute Wool Pots for those nasty black plastic ones!
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