Paper Pots

This may turn out to be the most boring post ever, but I really want to show a cheap and easy way to make pots for seed starting and potting up. I can't bring myself to actually pay money for pots for in the greenhouse, and while I enthusiastically reuse all the plastic pots that end up coming my way, there are only so many of them, and they disintegrate all too rapidly.


Years ago, a friend loaned me a paper pot maker---one of those nifty little wooden gadgets that you can pay biggish bucks for in the "green" catalogs, and I liked it pretty well, but it had its limitations. Such as the one size of pot you could make with it, which was too small for a lot of what I needed, and also the fact that somewhere along the line I lost it. So I started making newspaper pots using different size tin cans for the form. It works great! A little labor intensive, but very, very cheap. Newspapers work, and so do old phone books. And just like a peat pot, you plant the whole thing, pot and all. Not that there's usually all that much pot left by the time you put it out---it's mostly a soil ball held together by roots and a thin veneer of paper.