I have thousands of Milkweed seeds and not enough to do over the winter. Milkweed is famously fussy about being transplanted, which is annoying because I have a local charity giving out free native plants and seeds, and most people just don't have the patience/belief in themselves to grow plants from seed unfortunately, so germinated seedlings are the best way to get people planting them.
So this is my experiment in transplanting Milkweed more successfully. I'm using recycled cardboard that I cut and fold into a box, which is held loosely together with a bit of twine. When the Milkweed is germinated and gets to a decent size, I will dig out a hole where I want to plant it, maybe twice the width of the box/pot. Then I'll cut the twine to let the sides unfold, and fill back in with soil. So this will leave the sides free to grow new roots with minimal disturbance to the existing roots. It will leave a bed of cardboard underneath, but this will eventually break down and allow roots to grow down if necessary. I've considered making the bottom fall away first, then untying the sides after placing it and leaving no cardboard. Hightens the risk of disturbing the roots though so I'm unsure.
I know its essentially a janky peat pot, but it kills 2 birds with 1 stone because it allows me to recycle some Christmas cardboard (and I'm also trying not to buy any peat products anymore). If it works out, everyone in town is getting free milkweed for Easter…or Memorial Day or something I dk. I'll also potentially use it for other plants with issues transplanting. After getting the hang of it, it takes me like 5-7 minutes per pot to make them, so it's pretty good busy work to keep me from losing my mind inside all winter.
Thoughts and suggestions are welcome, I'm just winging it here.
by Crepe_Cod
5 Comments
What a terrific idea!
I used cardboard oatmeal cylinders (cut in half) to do the same thing!
Good luck 🙂
Did you cold stratify the seeds first?
Let us know if you have any lessons learned afterwards. Good luck!
>Milkweed is famously fussy about being transplanted
that is extremely species-dependent. i can transplant *Asclepias tuberosa* in all the months that aren’t July and August and it doesn’t give a shit
this is a cool idea though and i support your winter experimentation!
I did something similar last year. Took about 8 seeds from my swamp milkweed, and put them in containers which I left in my garage.
Of the 8, 6 ended up transplanted to the ground. 2 of them never germinated, but the cells I had them in got moldy.
They appeared to thrive in the ground, but we had to have some tree work done and I think the tree guys ran two of them over. We’ll see if they come back. The others were really doing well.