Now I can't believe you don't get "Junk mail" where you live. As for colored paper I understand they no longer have lead in the ink and are as safe as black and white print. In the area I live in they throw a paper on my driveway all the time which we almost never read. Check with your neighbors also. We have paper pickup in our area and we have little plastic boxes to put out on our curbs. If you use newspaper you cut it into strips and place in water. Use a container for wrapping those strips around it and allow to completely dry. If you wrap with enough layers it will be as hard as most any pot and will not sag or change its shape if you don't set them into a tray of water for a long time. If it is thick you may want to punch a hold in the bottom of your pot. When planting you leave everything but make sure there isn't any paper above ground when you put in your transplant as it can "wick" the water out of the soil around your new plant. They also say to water the ground in the area where you want to set out these transplants the day before and let your plant go a little dry, this way the new transplant will have to reach out for water by growing new roots. If you use Styrofoam Cups they work best if you make little slits on three sides about half way down from the bottom of the "rim." [I use a old hacksaw blade which I broke off and grounded so it has a nice point which goes into the Styrofoam quite nicely. Then when you get ready to plant they are easier to break open for transplant without disturbing the roots.] They then break off quickly if you just "snap" your fingers around that rim. Using a bulb planter you will be able to put them into the ground with very little problems. One side thought, I do Genealogy and have been looking for a "Gardening Software Program" Well I find my Genealogy program works great for keeping records on all my gardening projects. It will hold all the pictures I take as well as all kinds of places for note etc. The nice thing is I don't need just one more program on my Computer. Paul

Use it. Very few printers use heavy metals any more, because they don't want the hassle and expense of cleaning the presses and disposing of the inks. The last time I had printing done we had two ink choices for one color, and one of them had a "clean-up" surcharge.

I don't know what others will think about them, Lizzy, but I don't recommend using any sort of permeable pots out here with our low humidity. Watering for some plants can be hard enough, and when the moisture can evaporate up, down, and every-which-way-possible, keeping the plants wet enough without overwatering can be very difficult. I even stopped using clay pots a long time ago because watering was too hard when I was using them. At one of our swaps a couple years ago somebody (have no idea who it was) brought some seedlings in paper pots, they were very small (don’t know when they had been seeded), and, to me they looked like they were really struggling to grow . I noticed that the paper looked like it was mostly dry, but when somebody picked one up and looked closely at it they commented that the soil was saturated. I wasn’t interested in the particular plants in the pots, so I didn’t look at them any more closely, but based on the appearance of the plants I didn’t think it looked like a good idea. A few years ago at a swap I gave away what I had left of some VERY old peat pots and pellets I had. They just don’t work out here in my opinion, and I gave fair warning to the person who took them. I don’t know what happened with them after that! I recommend (and use) plastic pots. Square ones are the most “efficient” since they fit closely together , and if you get the right size to fit into the “segmented flats” like the ones used at garden centers, it will make using, growing, and moving your plants around very easy. The flats have holes in the bottom so water retention is no problem. With plastic the soil will dry from the top down (rather than from "all sides") so you can help promote good root growth by letting the soil dry deeper and deeper in the pot before watering them again. Long ago I used to always wash my pots before reusing them, and then I soaked them in a mild bleach solution to be sure they were all the way clean. Then I ran out of time and started just reusing them “as is,” and, having never had any sort of a major disease problem, I never noticed any problems with doing that. I do still occasionally wash a few for a “special project” if there’s something I want to be absolutely sure about, but I find myself doing that less and less often too now--VERY few things get a “clean” pot with me! (I do still use clean pots if I'm rooting cuttings I think I might have a problem with.) I don’t now what “cow pots” are (made out of cow pies???) but I’m thinkin’ they’re something very close to peat/paper pots. If you do decide to try the paper pots, be sure you remove as much of the pot as possible before putting your plants in the ground or I’m pretty sure you’ll continue to have the same problems you did with the “cow pots.” I’ve always kind of wondered how well the peat--and similar--pots decompose even when they’re planted in the Midwest or some other humid place, but out here it just doesn’t work. Any “pot” left above the soil line will just wick moisture away from the roots, and even “pot” left in the ground will interfere with moisture moving from in or out of “the pot” to the surrounding soil. There was a thread about paper pots around here a couple years ago, and if you go to the search box on the BOTTOM of the main RMG page (by “birthdays”) you can search just this forum to look for it if you want to. Don’t really remember what all was said! If you do decide to try some of them, come back and give us a report after you’ve had time to decide what you think of them. Skybird This post was edited by skybird on Thu, Jan 9, 14 at 15:23

Just wondered how your newspaoer pots have done? I made up a bunch to try to see how they would do to start some live oaks in. So far they seem to be holding up allright even after being completly under water after last weeks big rain storm. But, they have only been in use for a few weeks, so I don't know if it's too early to tell if they'll hold out for the season or not. Wolf