How To Make Your Own Seed-Starting Pots From Newspaper

I recently discovered a great way to save some money and recycle at the same time! You can't beat that, right?

Many types of plants should be started from seed indoors before your last frost date so they can get a jumpstart on growing before the season really warms up. However, planting them in the cells that you see them in at Wal-Mart or the hardware store can start getting expensive if you have a lot of seedlings. It can also be hard to get them out of those packs when it comes time to transplant them, and a lot of plants do not like to have their roots disturbed. The solution is to make your own newspaper seed-starting pots. These pots give the plants plenty of room to grow. And here's the best part: You can plant the newspaper pots right in the ground! You don't have to disturb the plant at all.

Newspaper is absolutely safe to put in your garden. In fact, I have seen composting books that suggest adding shredded newspaper to bulk up your compost. The only caution is to use newspaper with black ink. The colored inks can sometimes be damaging to your soil.

Making the newspaper pots is easy and fun! Once you get the hang of it, you can make quite a few in a short period of time.  If you have a hard time figuring out how to fold the pots yourself, Burpee's makes a newspaper pot making tool that makes it extremely easy.  This would be a great project to do with kids.

Right now, I have tomatoes, snow peas, and broccoli growing in these pots. The tomatoes have been in the pots for over 3 weeks, and the pots are holding up VERY well.