Solo Cup Gardening, Will It Work?

I have been watching youtube tutorials about growing plants in double Solo cups, and it looks pretty simple and easy for most anyone to do.
I got two sizes of Solo cups (Walmart brand) , a red 18 oz, and a clear 16 oz 50-pack of each one, and the clear ones will be for the bottom so it is easy to check water level and see how the roots are growing.

I have liquid nutrients that I use for the aerogardens, so that should also work to water the solo cup plants. It looks like lettuce, spinach and other smaller plants can just stay in the solo cup, and the larger ones, like tomatoes or peppers, can then be transplanted once they have a good start growing in the cups.
I am thinking of trying strawberries, too.

I am starting my first ones today, and will be giving updates as they grow. Using the cups also makes it really simple to label what is growing in each cup and when I planted it.
If I transplant the seedling when it grows too large for the cup, I will try to avoid making the Calendar note on my doctor calendar instead of the gardening calendar ; so I do not have Mr. Bobby asking me what kind of transplant I am having, and why is he just now hearing about it.
When I explained that it was just bok choy that were being transplanted, he was a lot happier. Apparently, Robin didn’t see it before I corrected it to the proper Calendar, or she would have been messaging me in a panic about having some kind of a transplant !

This video shows how to do the double cup, and the difference in growth when nutrients are added to the water vs. just using plain water. The difference in plant size is just AMAZING ! !

 

I had also mentioned the solo cups in the thread for easy gardening ideas, @Marie Mallery , and that is where you saw it yesterday. Since I decided to try growing some plants this way, I started another thread , just for Solo cup container gardening. It is so easy that I think maybe others will want to try this, too, and we can compare notes on how things are growing and what we are doing with them.

My strawberries just do miserably here in the heavy red clay, so I also brought in 3 strawberry plants in the Solo cups. They might need a larger container eventually, but I think they should at least start to grow better this way.
I was also reading about using the larger yogurt or cottage cheese containers the same way, and since they are a little larger (24-32 oz) they should hold a larger plant.

Here are the strawberries in the solo cups. I have them alongside of the small aerogarden, so they will get more light.

 

I bought some plant containers at Dollar Tree, and moved the strawberries into one of the long tray containers. I have several trays of strawberries now, and if I see more trying to come up, then I will transplant those, too. Since the weather is warm, and the strawberries have been outside anyway, I have moved all of the containers outside where they can grow and get sunshine.

I have about 10 of the Solo cups planted thus far, with a variety of different seeds, to see what grows and what does not. Some of them, I will need to move to larger containers as they grow; but the ones with greens like lettuce and spinach should be fine to keep right in the cup and harvest as needed for salads and stirfry meals.
It looks like I have some red leaf lettuce and some amaranth starting to sprout in two of the cups.

 

The solo cups are working really well, except I don’t have enough space in my storage room where I have the aerogardens. Now that the weather is warming up enough to start plants outside, I am going to start doing that instead.
The problem with planting outdoors in the yard and garden, is that the squirrels and the birds eat all the seeds, and the squirrels will dig them right up. One time, I thought I would outsmart the squirrels, so I planted the sunflower seeds, and then planted an iris over top of them, knowing that the sunflower would sprout around the iris tubers.
The next morning, I went out to fine that the squirrels had dug up all of the irises, and then eaten all of the sunflower seeds and left me a pile of little shells , just to be snarky.

So, today, I looked on Amazon and found one of those little mini greenhouses with the plastic cover. I should be able to set it up in the back yard, and it will hold plenty of the solo cups and keep the squirrels away , hopefully.
They are not real sturdy, but I won’t be putting anything in that is very heavy, so it should work fine.

 

My mini-greenhouse arrived, and @Bobby Cole set it up for me yesterday. He also set up some shelves that he had, so I now have an indoor potting shed, and the outdoor area for everything to grow until it is ready to go in the larger potting containers for the summer.
I am really happy about this ! Hoping for a nice summer this year and a good garden.