Permaculture, Homesteading, and Community Building // Making DIY Newspaper Planting Pots for Sunflowers

Hi friends! Today I want to share with you how I made my own organic planting pots out of old newspaper. I admittedly use plastic planting pots for many of my seed starts, but I wanted to explore an alternative using recycled and biodegradable material. I stumbled upon the idea of making planting pots out of newspaper and ran with it.

This photo is of the first sunflower I ever planted, four summers ago

I had also just received sunflower seeds from my friend and was excited to plant them. However, I had read that sunflowers do not like root disturbance, so starting them in plastic pots and transplanting them wasn't the best option. A lightbulb clicked in my head! I could start my sunflower seeds in my soon to be newspaper pots. Once the sunflowers had enough time in the greenhouse and had two sets of true leaves, I would transplant them to my garden and keep them in the newspaper pots. I could do this because newspaper is biodegradable and the sunflower roots would soon be able to break through the disintegrating newspaper.

I found this tutorial on making the pots : http://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-make-organic-planting-pots-using-old-newspa/
I stuck to the general idea, but I thought that using a bottle would make pots that were too big for my wants. Instead, I found an old PVC coupling and used that. You can find PVC couplings at almost any hardware store. Here is an example: http://www.homedepot.com/p/DURA-2-in-Schedule-40-PVC-Coupling-C429-020/100346899

I invited my friends Danielle and Kamille over to help me make these newspaper pots. I thought that it would take us maybe an hour to make enough to fill two flats...it took us multiple hours. I realized that my dreams of using biodegradable DIY newspaper pots for all of my plant starts wouldn't be reasonable. We still had a great time doing them, and it was a great way to chat and connect while communally creating something. The act of making these pots was also very meditative.

A day later, I planted the pots with my friend's sunflower seeds and patiently waited. A few weeks later they germinated and started to visibly grow. I waited until the sunflowers had two sets of true leaves before transplanting them outside.

My friend, Brooke, recently visited me. We spent a morning prepping an area for the sunflowers. First, we cleared the area of all of the stuff that had been building up (wood, bamboo, pallets, burlap sacks, pots). Then, we went up to the compost bins and collected some of our homemade, yummy, worm filled compost.

We wheelbarrowed the compost down, and shoveled a 2-inch layer of compost in the area we would soon be planting in.

We were having a lot of fun dancing while shoveling... :-)

We made holes 8 inches apart, and started to plant our baby sunflowers!

We soon finished planting all of the babies, and Brooke spent some time watering them in. We gave them our blessings, lots of love, and encouragement to grow, and danced some more. I'm so excited for the sunflowers to bloom this summer. I'm also excited to harvest the seeds and gift them to my mother - she is an avid sunflower seed eater.

I also recently read that I can harvest sunflower seeds and boil the seeds. Boiling them separates the oil from the rest of the seed, the oil rises to the top, and you can scrape the oil off and use it for future cooking oil. Has anyone ever tried this? Hopefully I can test this out at the end of the summer and report back to Steemit about the success of harvesting sunflower oil. Happy summer everyone! (or winter if you're in the Southern Hemisphere!)