Newspaper Pots

Some plants, like the peppers above, require a long time to grow to maturity, bloom, set fruit, and ripen. In most areas, those plants are not grown from seed sown directly into the garden, but from already established young plants called seedlings. This gives them a jump start and allows them to produce before the fall frosts hit.

If you grow your own seedlings, you'll need some kind of container to hold them until they get big and strong and the night temperatures are warm enough for the young plants to survive. Behold the newspaper pot.


To make your own stylish newspaper pot, you will need some old newspapers (new will do), some masking tape, and a drinking glass or other cylinder about 3" to 4" in diameter. A soda can is a good diameter but I find it's too short. It may suit you fine though.

Tear the big newspaper sheets down the center so you have two sheets with only one page on each side. Fold one of these resulting single-page sheets in half vertically so the crease runs from top to bottom and the left and right edges are together.


Roll the folded newspaper sheet loosely around the cylinder and tape the seam. Loosely, because the little beasties are really hard to get off the cylinder if you roll them tightly. I like to put the fold of the newspaper on the cylinder and let the ragged edge hang off the end. It makes for a neater finished product.

Find a place on your cylinder that you can use as a mark for lining up the top of your pot. While this step isn't necessary it's nice because it makes all your resulting pots a uniform height, which is important to anal people like me.

Fold the "hanging off" edges to the center of the cylinder and hold in place with a piece of tape.


Voila!

You can fit about 6 by 3 newspaper pots in a seed starting tray. They're nice because they allow you to put water directly into the tray, which waters your seedlings from the bottom up.

When you get ready to transplant, you can set the pot directly into the ground where it will disintegrate. Newspaper ink is soy based so will not harm your plants. Tear the top off of the pot or dig your hole deep enough to set the pot completely below ground level. If you leave the top of the pot exposed to the air, it will wick moisture away from the roots of the plant and into the air, drying out the roots of your plant.

I like to also tear the bottom out of my pot so the roots can grow downward more easily. I frequently just tear the pot completely off and toss it into the compost bin.