If you are a beginner with gardening, or gardening with kids, here is a handy little tip to prevent you from pulling up your seedings when you direct sow your seeds: push 1/3 of a toilet paper roll (minus the paper) into the dirt and plant your seed in it.  Allow the top of the cardboard to stick out of the dirt enough that you can see it.  As your seed sprouts, you can be pretty sure that whatever is in the toilet paper tube is most likely your seedling and anything outside the toilet paper roll is safe to weed.  To be even more sure, you can dig a hole for your toilet paper roll, pop it in, and put putting soil inside the toilet paper tube instead of dirt.  This gives your seed a little bit of time before potential weeds make their way through the potting soil.

If your kids are helping with weeding, tell them to leave whatever is in the toilet paper alone and pull out all the rest!

If you have started your seedlings in toilet paper rolls, when it comes time to transplant you can set the whole thing in the garden – tube and all – and it will serve as a little reminder as to location of your seedling.  Trying to tell seedlings and weedlings apart can be hard!

The cardboard will decompose on its own over a short amount of time – no worries about it sticking around in the dirt for years to come.