We subscribe to our local daily newspaper and a couple of Sunday papers, so even though hard times have rendered newspapers a lot thinner than they used to be, the papers tend to build up. Here are a few ways we like to reuse our newspapers around the home and garden!
How to Reuse Newspapers
In the Garden
With two woodstoves in continuous use from late November through April, we use most of our winter newspapers as fire starters. The ashes we don’t use to provide traction on icy walkways, we add as a pH-raising amendment to our garden soils.
The papers have other horticultural uses, too:
- During the growing season, we use newspapers as a weed-suppressing mulch. We lay them down several pages thick and cover the paper with a thin layer of hay, pine needles, or wood chips to make aisles between our garden beds.
- To create a new garden spot without mechanical tillage, I lay down a thick layer of newspapers (flattened cardboard boxes work well, too); top it off with a thinner layer of hay, straw, or leaves; and let the space sit a year. By the following spring, the grass underneath will have died, and voilà!—a soil ready to fertilize, amend, and plant.
- I also protect young vegetable seedlings from cutworms by wrapping the lower stem with a tight collar of wet newspaper that extends an inch into the soil and at least an inch above the soil line.
- To ripen green tomatoes indoors, I harvest blemish-free fruits when frost threatens, wrap each in a piece of newspaper, and set them in a cool, dark cellar. Sometimes they last through Thanksgiving.
In the Home
During many years of freelance writing for newspapers (and always tending a big vegetable garden), I often joked about the fun of eating my words. But since this isn’t a gardening blog, allow me to share a few of the hundred and one others ways I use newspapers around the house:
- Cleaning windows: Crumpled newspaper and white vinegar make an unbeatable combo for washing windows and other glass surfaces.
- Wrapping paper: Very chic, especially if you select the right news for the occasion or decorate the newspaper with potato prints.
- Cut-flower holder: Torn or shredded, moistened, and stuffed into a vase, old newspapers will hold cut flowers, greens, or branches in place. Add more if you need to.
- Shape-holders: Crumple newspapers and stuff them into shoes, handbags, and hats you don’t use often to help them hold their shapes.
- Funny hats: I once worked with a colleague who’d previously spent many years as a daycare worker and was a master of newspaper-hat making. He had a hat for every occasion. Retirements, marriages, promotions, failed budget negotiations—Tom always came out with a news-hat that spoke to the occasion.
What do you do with old newspapers? Recycle or reuse? Let us know in the comments!
Reader Comments
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Coffee can odor eater plus planting cups
(1) When my family used to save coffee cans all year to redistribute with tamales during the holidays, we'd stuff the cans with crumpled newspaper to get rid of the coffee smell. They sat in the laundry room all year, with an occasional change-out of paper until needed.
(2) Years ago my mother gave me a little gadget that presses four layers of newspaper into a seedling cup. You start a seed in it (with a little soil) and when it's ready to plant it can go right into the ground where the cup disintegrates as the plant grows. I want to say she got it at Lillian Vernon but I may not remember that correctly and I can't find one there now. Maybe Vermont Country Store? No matter. There are many tutorials of how to fold them by hand anyway.
jh
Newspaper in garden
Does the paper attract earwigs? They can hide in paper can be a problem?
Newspaper Mulch
Using newspaper or any other layered material in the garden can be a refuge for creatures like earwigs and isopods (“roly-polys”), but these aren’t worth worrying about unless they appear in a significant numbers. If that’s the case, then you may want to remove the paper for a time.
Uses for newspapers
Surprised no one uses newspaper for food odors left in plastic containers or jars after they have been washed. Crumple a few pages, stuff them in the containers, cap them, and the food odors will disappear in a few days. Also for the window cleaning w/vinegar - best to use black and white printed sheets and not the colored sheets. This goes for the food odors, too.
Newspaper uses
I use newspaper to make starter pots for seedlings. They can just go into the ground.
Recycle Newspaper
The Humane Society where I live in Georgia uses newspapers for cleanup and bedding.
What i do with newspapers
I put crumpled up news paper between chicken wire and black plastic containers, to help the containers not get too hot and help retain some moisture. It does reduce the size of the container but only a little bit. This is the first time I tried this so I don't know if it will help yet..
Great blog. I'd like to try
Great blog. I'd like to try the glass cleaning and the mulching method. Questions: If you use newspapers to clean windows or floors, would they get smeary? And if you put in your garden, would you have little pieces of newspaper everywhere that you'd never get rid of?
Andy, the newspaper will not
Andy, the newspaper will not smear because you don't soak the newspaper in the cleaning solution. Spray you glass with the window cleaner, get one that doesn't streak, then wipe your window down with the wadded up newspaper instead of paper towels or cloth; as for the gardening, newspapers will return to the soil by rotting away completely over time.
I too use
newspapers to clean windows in home & cars.
I thought it was a joke a first, but wow, those newspapers do a great job of cleaning without smearing !
As a scrapbooker and family
As a scrapbooker and family historian, I would also add that you should scan the occasional newspaper. They can give you a great snapshot of a particular time, commemorate an event, even the advertising pages can make a great digital background paper for photos from the same time period.
I would also add that if you have a family member or an ancestor mentioned in an article, that you should donate the paper to the local historical or genealogical society - or at least give them an electronic transcription of the article. I can't tell you how much I discovered about my family just because somebody took the time to copy out the local society column for the Genweb project.
After that, go ahead and use it as a weed killer.
unfortunately if we do not
unfortunately if we do not put out a green bin (along with a blue bin) they will not take our trash. And you can't put out empty bins because they still won't take your trash. I try to put boxes from cereal etc. instead but being elderly, those are infrequent to empty.
Recycling newspaper
Is there a recycling site for items like newspapers and plastic, etc? If you cannot take these items maybe a friend or relative could pick them up.