I love to garden. I find it both fun and meditative and one of my favorite on purpose past times.  The last couple of years I've wanted to start my gardening experience earlier by starting my own seeds.  I did this years ago and found it a lot of fun. 

While living in Massachusetts I even built my own little cold frame but then left it behind when I moved back south, which has been part of what stopped me from starting my seeds these past couple of years.

Ahh, but this year I decided to go online and see what I could find and presto…I found winter sowing, or more specifically wintersown.org.  There I learned what I view is the perfect way to sow my own seeds using recyclable containers like milk jugs, large plastic bottles, etc. 

Since we recycle as much of that kind of stuff as possible, we already had a 'starter kit' handy:

So, I took my starter kit down to the garage and drilled some drainage holes in the bottom of each container, and air ventilation holes in the top.  I then filled them with potting soil and dug out some seeds from the last couple of seasons.  I know that might be a touchy point. Maybe the 'old seeds' will sprout and maybe they won't.  Just in case I decided to sow heavy — putting more seeds in each container.

And voila my winter (OK, early spring) sowing garden:

In the meantime, I also sent wintersown.org a SASE with two stamps and they've sent me back a whole bassle of seeds, many of which have come from other volunteer gardeners.  How great is that?

Stay tuned.  I've already started to see some of the seeds are germinating, and tonight I'll find out if how they fair when a cold snap comes into our area.