Pots Sowing Seeds

Pots Made From Cow Pats

Photo: www.agweb.com

When you’re shopping for biodegradable pots with permeable sides for seed-sowing, something you might well need in order to transplant fragile seedlings into the garden without disturbing their roots, you can, of course, easily find models made from peat or coir (coconut fiber) … but there is also another possibility: pots made from cow manure. 

Pots made of cow pats? Who’d a thunk it! Photo: bmr.co

Yep, I’m not kidding; cow pat pots! The brand name is CowPots.

Just fill the fibrous-looking brown pots with moist soil and sow your seeds in the center. When the time comes to transplant them to the garden, you just “plant the pot rather than the plant.” In other words, you bury the pot in the ground, leaving the young plant’s root system undisturbed inside. No more transplanting stress!

Roots grow right through the porous sides. Photo: cowpots.com

The porous nature of the CowPots sides allows the roots to grow through the pot and expand into the soil all around it. In addition, CowPots naturally contain minerals useful for seedling growth, including nitrogen.

Moreover, the nitrogen contained in the pot sides promotes their natural decomposition. Less than 3 or 4 weeks after planting them out, they’ll start to disappear. At the end of the season, they are no longer there!

Safe and Ecological!

With CowPots, everything is recycled or reused. Ill.: cowpotscanada.com

CowPots give off no unpleasant odors and are perfectly safe to handle, since heat treatment has destroyed all possibly noxious germs (and also weed seeds). And all this is done ecologically: a biodigester dries the manure and the resulting methane is used to run the manufacturing facility!

In Canada, EcoCert Canada has approved CowPots for organic agriculture.

History of CowPots

CowPots are the creation of brothers Matt and Ben Freund, second-generation dairy farmers in the northwest hills of Connecticut. Matt started experimenting with manure fibers on the kitchen table, drying the pots in his wife’s toaster oven. This didn’t do much for his marriage, but it allowed him the ability to share his vision with other people. Since 1997, they are one of only a few farms across the United States to have continuously run a methane digester. 

CowPots come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. Photo: cowpots.com

After many trials and tribulations, the brothers found an economical way to mass-produce pots of limitless sizes and shapes. CowPots has since evolved in production capacity and become a state-of-the-art facility that can create energy for the farm, fertilizer for the fields and CowPots.

Where to Find Them?

You can start almost any seed in a CowPot. Photo: cowpots.com

In Canada and the US, you can probably find CowPots in a garden center near you or even a hardware store. Otherwise, look for them online at TrueValue.com and Amazon.com in the US and W.H. Perron and Veseys in Canada. In Europe, where the product has only recently been introduced, you probably will have to order them on the Internet. Amazon is one likely source. And you can find them on eBay in Australia.

CowPots: the pots you plant!

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Garden writer and blogger, author of 65 gardening books, lecturer and communicator, the Laidback Gardener, Larry Hodgson, passed away in October 2022. Known for his great generosity, his thoroughness and his sense of humor, he reached several generations of amateur and professional gardeners over his 40-year career. Thanks to his son, Mathieu Hodgson, and a team of contributors, laidbackgardener.blog will continue its mission of demystifying gardening and making it more accessible to all.

4 comments on “Pots Made From Cow Pats

  1. I actually have a few right here. I did not purchase them of course, but acquired them from someone else.

  2. Having spent my childhood summers on my grandparents small dairy farm, I wish CowPots nothing but success. Now, I’m off to see where I can find them. Thank you.

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