Best Garden

Newspaper gardening??  Sounds a little funny, doesn’t it?  Admittedly, newspaper gardening is not a really self-evident term, which is to say that one does not understand just exactly what one should DO with newspapers in order to make a brand of gardening into newspaper gardening.  If you’re one of the many who has not yet heard of newspaper gardening, or if you’ve heard of it, but are not quite sure what it is exactly, read on to find out the many ways that newspaper can be used in your gardening practices both to improve your garden and to use up all those newspapers instead of throwing them out.

A really simple way to use newspapers in your gardening activities is to pick tomatoes early, before they have fully ripened, and wrap each one individually in newspaper.  Wrapped in the newspaper, they will ripen much slower than they would on the vine.  If you let half of the tomatoes from your plants ripen to perfection and half of them you pick early, the half that you left on the vines will become ripe at the normal time in your region’s gardening season, and the ones pre-picked and wrapped in newspaper will become ripe long after the first harvest.  This means that you will have fresh tomatoes for a much longer period of the year than you would normally have.  This method is easy and requires nothing but a few pieces of newspaper and the wherewithal to remember to pick the tomatoes before they ripen on the vine.

Another handy way to use newspapers in your garden is to use them to kill weeds.  When you have weeds that are very close to other plants and you don’t want to use chemical pesticides and herbicides on the weeds because of the nearby plant growth, you can use newspapers to suffocate the weeds.  If you cover the weeds with newspaper and then securely fasten the edges so that the newspaper cannot blow off, the weeds will die naturally from being deprived of sunlight.  When the weeds are dead, simply remove the newspaper covering.  Of course, hearty weeds will grow back, at which time you can simply repeat the process.

A third and final way to incorporate newspapers into your gardening practice is to use them to seal water into the ground if you are unable to water your garden for a week at a time.  How this works is to cut a round piece of newspaper and then cut a circular hole in the center of the circle where the plant can pass through.  Thoroughly wet this circular piece of newspaper and then thoroughly water the plant as you would normally water it.  Place the newspaper circle around the plant and then give the plant a little more water.  This newspaper will seal the water into the soil so that the soil stays wetter much longer.  This means that the first rays of sun will not dry the soil out; instead, the water will continue to seep into the soil and therefore continue to provide water to the plant for days to come.  This sort of newspaper seal is extremely effective and easy to make.  It’s also much cheaper than hiring someone to take care of your garden when you go on vacation next summer.

Whether you use any or all of these ingenious ideas make sure to set your old newspapers aside.  For newspaper gardening, only black and white pages (no color) should be used; these are toxin free.  Any newspapers (whether black and white or in color) that you don’t use for your garden can be recycled to reduce the amount of waste produced in your household.