Gardening with Newspaper

I buy the Sunday paper almost every week for the coupon inserts and we also get a couple of free local newspapers. After I’m done looking through them I usually save them for use in starting the grill or the fire pit in the back yard, but I always have more “leftover” newspapers than I could ever possibly use.

While on Pinterest (I know, Jared says I’m addicted), I saw a couple of ideas for using old newspapers in gardening and decided to try them with our garden this year.

The first idea that I saw was to form seed starter “pots” out of old newspapers. You use a soup can to shape your newspaper, fill the new “pot” with dirt, plant the seeds and set them in a leak proof container (so you can water the plants without making a mess). Then when you are ready to transfer the seedlings to your garden you just unfold the bottom and place the plant (newspaper, dirt and all) into the ground. I was getting ready to start my tomatoes indoors so I decided to give it a shot. I’m so glad that I did, too. My plants are growing nicely and it saved me some $ (which is always nice). I plan to do this with the rest of my seeds this weekend.

My tomato plants are already a couple of inches tall after only few weeks

The second idea that I saw was using newspaper for weed control (it's #5 on the list). The article says that you can take newspaper and spread it out over your garden like you would with “landscape fabric”, spray it with water, cover with mulch, and let it will keep the weeds from growing. I’ve used landscape fabric before and it never keeps the weeds away as well as I’d like it to so I plan to give this a shot when I plant my garden outdoors. I am curious how well the newspaper holds up to the wind even with the mulch on top. If you’ve done this before please let me know how it went.