PLANTS DIDN’T EVOLVE to grow in plastic, as Emily Power likes to say, but the material is hard to avoid in garden gear and goods. That’s why Power created Kelp Pots — biodegradable seed starting pots that she says boost growth and reduce transplant shock while helping growers ditch plastic.
An internship at the Seattle Aquarium when she was young first sparked Power’s love of ocean conservation and sea animals. But it was a “60 Minutes” segment on commercial seaweed farming eight years ago that activated the former tech professional’s fascination with kelp.
Seaweed farmers produce kelp for food, bioplastics and skin care products and other uses while contributing to ocean health by creating underwater forests that shelter fish, crustaceans and other tiny sea creatures. Seaweed also absorbs carbon and nitrogen as it grows, helping to mitigate the planet’s climate crisis, a trait that Power says motivated her interest in the seaweed farming industry.
Early market analysis and a complicated local permitting process dissuaded Power from becoming a seaweed farmer but strengthened her resolve to support seaweed innovation. “What if we could make seaweed sexy, like kale?” she muses.
Then one day she looked around her garden and got fed up: “Plastic pots, plastic bags, plastic tools, plastic tags, plastic everything,” she says. Looking at a “graveyard castle” of plastic pots, she thought, “gross!”
The idea for Kelp Pots began to take shape as Power learned about kelp’s value in the garden. Coastal communities commonly use seaweed to fertilize crops, and the practice is a generational tradition among Native peoples throughout the West. In addition to providing plants with nutrients, Power discovered, kelp is also a biostimulant that enhances plant growth and stress tolerance — and its cellulous material could be used to make containers.
Power shared her idea for Kelp Pots with her husband, Les Hilliard, who encouraged her to give it a go. Today, Power runs Seattle-based Ocean Made (oceanmade.co), which makes them, and Hilliard is creative director.
Seaweed is an aquatic plant — technically it’s algae — that continually cycles through drying out on the beach and reconstituting when the tide comes back in. If you’ve ever struggled with trying to revive seedlings trapped in a dried-out peat pot, you may appreciate how Kelp Pots hold onto moisture then easily rewet as the potting mix dries. What’s more, the expandable nature of the alginate structure doesn’t strangle roots, and the material’s breathability encourages a dense root ball, which in turn helps seedlings transition to life in the garden with minimal shock.
Kelp Pots are made from sustainably harvested sugar kelp and recycled organic fibers. Sourcing only farmed kelp, never wild harvested, means Ocean Made is supporting regenerative ocean farming. Meanwhile, by using downstream waste, such as cellulose material left over from processing seaweed, Power says she can keep pricing affordable, helping strengthen a circular economy around seaweed by providing additional revenue for local businesses and processors.
While Power’s love of the ocean, affection for plants and dislike of plastic all went into the formulation of Kelp Pots, her background in advertising and sales helps her connect consumers with a sustainable product.
“It’s a fun spiral game,” Power says. “We found [an item] that people … can easily understand how it translates into their life, and is a consumer-facing product that we can sell at scale.” The entrepreneur wants Kelp Pots to be an entry point for gardeners to learn more about the wonders of seaweed, adding, “It’s more important to us to get this product into the hands of 10,000 people, versus one farmer who would use 10,000 pots.”
Ocean Made continues to look for ways to integrate their technology into life in and out of the garden. The company is working on a prototype for a 72-cell tray that fits a standard nursery flat and works with systems gardeners are already using. And egg cartons!
“So many people tell us that they use egg cartons to start their seed,” says Power whose mind immediately goes to thinking about an egg carton with a secondary life as a seed tray that breaks down “leaving nothing but healthy plants and happy gardens behind.”
Lorene Edwards Forkner is the author of “Grow Great Vegetables Washington.” Find her at ahandmadegarden.com and at Cultivating Color on Substack.
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