Plant early with milk-jug mini-greenhouses

MOSES LAKE — Some plants are meant to be left in the ground through the winter, and now that it’s February and the ground outside is as hard as week-old peanut brittle, it’s a little late to be planting. Fortunately, there are ways to use milk jugs and even ice cube trays to get planting underway. “Some seeds need to be frozen in order to split their outer shell,” said Valerie Parrott, president of the Columbia Basin Garden Club. “Things like carnations, they really need to be cold. So, you just fill your ice cube tray (with water), dump a few seeds in one, freeze them for two weeks, then you can go outside and plant them, and that will act the same as a cold stratification ... as if they had gone through a lot of hard freeze cycles.”