Do you find that roots sneak out of the holes and slits and dig into the soil under the bags?
I'm thinking of a practice halfway between direct sowing and winter sowing in containers.
This will hopefully also serve as a partial slug-defense for small seedlings.
"plastic cloches"
I have lots of small (20 ounce) soda bottles from work's recycling. I cut off the bottoms and removed the labels.
Where the bottoms were curved and hence tallish, I'm saving those for beer-saucer slug traps.
Scraps go back into the recycle bin.
I'm going to drill 1/4" vent holes up high, and maybe small ones down low, so they don't overheat as much.
Then I plan to direct-sow 1-3 seeds close together and "screw" the bottles into the soil surrounding the seeds.
Hopefully the soil will keep bottles from blowing away. If squirrels and cats molest them, I may try draping chicken wire over it all.
I'll start by leaving caps on, if the bottles had screw-caps in the recycle bin. If those seem to overheat, I'll remove the caps.
If the rain is still heavy, I may replace the caps with tied-on scraps of window screening to shrug off some of the rain, and slow down and break up big drops.
I'm afraid that with caps off and no screening, slugs may be able to crawl up the outside and get in too easily. I'll learn that pretty quickly.
(At least, slugs probably won't be able to crawl back out due to the reverse curve and clean, slippery inner surface. One slug may get one to three seedlings, but then he'll be stuck in there!)
Corey
