Not Potty About Pots

The plastic plant pot is cheap to produce and handy to use, but just like plastic bags, they pile up in our gardens, bins and landfill.

What can gardeners do to help? Re-using plastic pots is a sensible alternative - give your surplus to neighbours or a local community project. Persuading your local garden centre or nursery to re-use pots may be more challenging but well worth the effort. Some garden centres are already taking the initiative – look out for the scheme at Wyevale Garden Centre in Chichester for example.

Biodegradable pots are becoming increasingly popular. They are made from a range of materials such as coir, wood chips, rice husks and even miscanthus or seaweed. Some of these last for a few months and can be planted straight into the soil where they gradually break down and add humus to the soil.

Both the longer-lasting and more temporary biodegradable pots dry out more quickly than ordinary plastic pots and at the moment are more expensive to produce. The production of these pots does have a carbon footprint too. If you want to buy plastic pots at peak sowing and growing times of the year (with or without plants in them), choose ones made from recycled plastic such as Plantpak.

Another choice for gardeners is to use cardboard tubes (sweet peas are good for these) and when many pots are needed (spring seed sowing) try making some from newspaper. We have included handy instructions to guide you – good luck with your own pot production!

For Perfect Paper Pots you will need:

• Several sheets of newspaper - try to find sheets that are mainly black & white as there may be chemical problems with coloured inks, although most now are vegetable based.

• 2 straight-sided cylindrical containers, one slightly bigger than the other so that they will "nest". Clean empty tins of different sizes would work. Take a full sheet of tabloid newspaper, i.e. 2 pages, and fold in half lengthways, giving you a rectangle slightly smaller than a sheet of A4 and four sheets thick. Place the open end of the larger container on the longer side of the newspaper rectangle about one-third of the way across, then roll the newspaper tightly round, forming a cylinder.

• Tuck the top end gently down into the can, then push the smaller container down into it, ramming & twisting it home, then remove. Wriggle the pot gently off the container. Now you have your basic pot! They do keep their shape, even wet, and can simply be planted out with their contents. Be sure that the plant pot is level with the soil to prevent "wicking". This means the exposed wet paper evaporates all the moisture up into the air & deprives the plant of water.

Varying the size of the containers and paper used can easily make different size pots, or you could even buy an inexpensive kit to do it for you.