The great toilet paper experiment

Maybe I should add the word "roll." The great toilet paper roll experiment.

I tend to keep a bunch of random junk. Much of this I blame on being a teacher (I need stuff for them to create with that I don't have to pay for) or being a mom (we can do so many cool things with this someday) or just being crafty (I saw this great idea once). I'm not certain that JD really understands what he's getting into with this deal, but hey, he's lucky. Lucky because we're moving right off the bat and I feel the need to get rid of all my "useless" junk.

My yard needs some TLC.

I have seeds, I have soil, I have two months to live here and a need to be sure that the yard is tolerably appealing to future owners/tenants (whichever route I end up going) or at least the HOA. So toilet paper rolls as planters were born.

Confession: I did not invent this idea. You can find it all over the place if you search for "plant seeds in toilet paper rolls" like I did. Since I looked at several results and then just jumped in bum first, I can't refer you to just one that inspired me.

Follow along on my potentially unusual recycling journey. My first step: snip the ends of the tubes about an inch down. I used kitchen shears because normal scissors just don't seem to survive in my house. Or they get fed up with things and run away. I can't quite figure it out.

Taking the snipped edges I folded each one down like when you wrap the bottom of a round gift at Christmastime. I sort of shoved them down a little so that they'd stay and ended up with the concave things you see behind my hand here.

Like these:

Then I flipped all those guys over, used them to scoop up some potting soil, and watered them. At this point I let them sit for a few hours. I wanted the soil to be evenly moist and not soggy when I plopped seeds in there. Oh, actually I labeled each roll with what I intended to plant in it before this too. Just so I don't later look at them and think, huh, which of these is watermelon and which is pumpkin? Or something of the sort.

But as you'll notice in the above photo, the rolls started unwrapping once they got moist. I went ahead and planted seeds anyway, hoping for the best. But the whole deal made me nervous enough that I decided to take matters into my own hands and fix it. I scootched them close to one another so they could lend each other support, then folded a tin foil band to wrap around the outside. The whole thing was then wrapped in plastic wrap to create a greenhouse and it's been stuck in my kitchen window.

The way I see it, this can go one of two ways: Marginal success or Epic fail. Which do you predict?