News Pots are the New Peat Pots
I make about $6.40 per hour while watching TV by repurposing newspaper to make my own news pots instead of buying peat pots. You’d think newspaper would make flimsy seedling pots, but these pots are quite sturdy. My instructions are a little different (better! but I’m biased) than others I’ve seen on the internet.
Well yes, the title is a bit misleading because news pots are really only new to me. But I couldn’t resist the “Orange is the New Black” reference. Sorry. It would be more accurate to say that I’ve recently started maintaining an old family tradition of turning potential waste into something useful.
I learned this technique from my mom, who learned it from my Uncle Gordon. He needed special gardening gloves tailored for him because his thumb was so big and green. When it comes to house plants, I did not inherit the green thumb gene that he and my mom got, but in our shared love of gardening, I feel a strong sense of kinship with him. He had a beautifully landscaped yard, specialized in Hostas and was known in our family for generously passing his carefully shepherded heirloom plants on to others.
My mom taught me how to make news pots in my sunny Colorado Springs backyard on an unseasonably warm March day when she and my dad were visiting from Minnesota. It was especially important for her to soak up the sun before going back to the last bite of winter in Minnesota, but this day under the intense Colorado sun is now a warm memory for me too.
How to make News Pots:
- Get some newspapers. Our local independent newspaper is a nice size, so I save these up throughout the year. Also grab a bowl of water and a straight-sided water glass the diameter you want your pots to be (I like ~2 or 2.5 in.).
- Tear 3 in. strips of newspaper—it’s easy to tear along the newspaper grain and is faster than cutting. Don’t sweat the wobbly strip edges, because there will be lots of overlap as you create the pot. The strip length should be long enough to wrap 2-3 times around the water glass.
- To make a pot, run a newspaper strip through a bowl of water and shake off the extra drips.
- Wind the strip around the water glass. It’s easiest to rotate the glass while letting the newspaper hang down rather than trying to move the paper around the glass. Make sure the layers are as flush with each other as possible with no gaps—this will make your pot sturdier. Let ~1-1.5 in. extend off the bottom edge of the glass.
- Fold the extra paper in towards the bottom of the glass so that it is just overlapping to make a base for your pot. If there’s not enough, or too much, you can slide the pot up or down the glass until you have the correct amount of material. Don’t press the base too tight or it will create a suction that makes it hard to slide off the glass.
- Slide the pot off the glass, handling it gently. Either in the palm of your hand, or after you set it in a tray, press the base folds down so that the bottom is secure and stable.
- Allow the pots to air in the tray until they are completely dry and stiff. In Colorado, this takes about 24 hours.
They might seem flimsy at the outset, but these little pots hold their shape very well over the entire sprouting season. This technique is a lot faster than the square origami-style folded pots I’ve seen featured on YouTube and other sites. Other rolled news pot techniques use dry paper, but I have found that using water at the outset creates a strong bond between the paper layers (like paper mâché) and they hold their shape better with continued wetting than dry-rolled pots.
Is the time spent worth the cost saved?
As I explained in my article A Year in the Life of a Vegetable Gardner, anything gardening is a hobby for me, thus the time spent doesn’t seem like a cost. But just for fun, I utilized the cost of peat pots I found at three hardware stores near my house to compute my “hourly wage” for making my own planting pots. It’s about $6.40 per hour. True, accounting for taxes, that’s 73% of minimum wage here in Colorado. But I’d rather get paid $6.40 per hour while watching back episodes of Law and Order than battle traffic and parking to go to the store.
These pots are quite environmentally friendly—modern newspaper ink is made of soy with organic pigments, and the paper is made of wood using a mechanical (not chemical) milling process. I also like to give the environment some help by repurposing newspaper I already have, rather than buying a new product that is made of harvested peat that has to be processed, packaged and shipped to my local store.
News pots also biodegrade more easily than peat pots, especially in dry and sandy western soils. This allows the roots to easily penetrate the pots—no need to tear them off before transplanting your sprouts. Just stick ‘em in the ground and go plants go!
Are you a geek like me?
If you are, you might want to know how I computed the cost saved by making newspaper pots. Here are the sticky details.
There are three places in Colorado Springs that I’d look for cheap peat pots: Home Depot, Ace Hardware and Lowe’s. I found the cheapest price at each place and figured the cost (with tax) for 55 such pots (see below), which is the number of news pots I can make in an hour.
I also computed the “time cost” for getting the pots (after all, to make my newspaper pots I just start ripping up newspaper), which includes driving there and back and time spent in the store. I would usually not go to the store to get the pots alone, but would pick up potting soil in the same process, and for going to Lowes, I would also go to my regular grocery store, which is in the same shopping center, so I split the time cost with these other errands.
Finally, I computed a cost per hour:
(55 Pot Cost)/(60 min – Time Cost) * 60
This formula s a little weird if you think about this data literally, but is not if you think of the costs acquiring peat pots being equivalent to my hour spent making newspaper pots at home for $0. My hourly rate for making pots at home is the average of these four rates.
Home Depot:
Jiffy Strips, 1 ¾ in. pots: $3.31
Time cost (split with potting soil): 16 min.
Cost per hour: $4.51
Ace Hardware:
Plantation Products, 1 1/3 in. pots: $4.75
Time cost (split with potting soil): 12 min.
Cost per hour: $5.93
Lowes:
Jiffy Pots, 3 in. pots: $7.81
Jiffy Strips, 4 in. pots: $4.81
Time cost (split with potting soil and groceries): 10 min.
Jiffy Pot cost per hour: $9.37
Jiffy Strip cost per hour: $5.77
