I buy the Dixie brand of 3 oz. and 5 oz. paper cups that are made for bathroom cup dispensers. Smaller seeds get started in the 3 oz. and larger seeds in the 5 oz. In stores like Wal-Mart they usually are sold on the upper shelf of the paper products row near aluminum foil, ziplock bags, etc. In stores like CostCo or Sam's, which is where I tend to buy them, they come in larger packages of 600 to 900 depending on the store and the size of the cup. Sometimes if I can't find them, I use 9 oz. cups, also from Dixie and usually available in large quantities at the warehouse stores.

I usually leave seedings in those little paper cups until they have at least 2 true leaves.

As plants get larger, I pot them up into larger cups (usually 9 oz. if they are slow-growing plants like peppers and 16 or 20 oz. Solo cups if they are faster-growing plants like tomatoes) as needed. With the tomato plants I hold for an extra month after my planting time so I can take them to the Spring Fling, I pot them up in 20 to 32 oz. styrofoam cups....whatever I can find, and the bigger the cups are, the harder they are to find.

Regardless what size cup I'm using, each cup gets at least 4 holes punched in the bottom for drainage. For that I normally use a sharp paring knife.

Dawn, are there any of the paper cups that you plant into the ground? For some reason, I seem to remember (although my memory could be wrong) that you plant the entire cup/plant into the ground--sorta like a peat cup.

I sometimes plant the 3 oz or 5 oz cups in the ground when I'm in a hurry. It causes less root disturbance. However, I prefer to remove them. When planting the paper cups, tearing out the bottom with your fingers before planting (it is easy to tear as they've been wait or at least a couple of weeks in the flats) will ensure the roots don't remain entrapped within the cups (which also is a problem with the netting around peat pellets). Most of the time, the cups will not decompose in the ground fast enough to just "disappear" the way I want them to, so when yanking out one crop to plug in a succession crop, I try to find and remove all the cups and toss them on the compost pile. So, while planting the cups leads to faster planting and less root disturbance, it also means you have to deal with the cups sooner or later. This year, when preparing the soil for planting, I found cups from last year's bean plants that had not decomposed in the soil, and we got a little over 78" of rain last year....so if they aren't going to decompose in ground that moist, what will it take?

Often, with succession plantings....like when I plugged in pole beans and southern peas the other day to succeed the sugar snap peas, the beans and/or peas have been in the cup for such a brief time, usually just long enough for the cotyledons to emerge, that there's not enough root system yet to hold the soil together, so I have to plant them cups and all, or otherwise when I try to remove the very young plants from the cups, all the soil-less growing medium just falls on the ground. So, there's no hard and fast rule for when I plant cups versus when I remove them....I just do whatever seems like it is going to work in that specific case on that specific day.

I used to sit in the winter and cut the bottoms out of the cups so I could plant bottomless cups, but that got old really quickly even if I did it a couple of months in advance and had the cups stockpiled, so now I just hope that by the time I'm planting, the cups had gotten wet enough from watering that the bottom of the cup tears out easily.

Thanks Dawn for the info. James

Hi James, You're welcome! Dawn