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Welcome to Digging In, a column for the horticulturally curious. If you’ve ever entertained bucolic fantasies about starting a farm or lingered around the seed packet display at the hardware store thinking about the things you would grow if you could, this is for you. Whether you have massive tracts of land at your disposal or just a few square feet of fire escape, every gardening endeavor starts with a pile of dirt and a dream.
I’m a do-things-by-hand kind of person. I took a class in college called Sheep to Shawl, in which I learned how to wash, dye, card, and spin wool for knitting. I had a brief stint as a bindery apprentice, and I recently re-webbed a vintage sofa because it was marginally cheaper than buying a new one. “Convenience is a vice” is a maxim I seek to live by—when I’m not staring at my phone. So when I first happened upon a paper pot press, it immediately won me over.
Normally if I’m starting seeds for my garden, I’d use standard-issue plastic seedling trays, or the biodegradable pulp ones when I can find them at a garden store. But that was before I knew a better way. The paper pot press allows you to make your own seedling planters out of paper destined for the recycling bin. It’s a small piece of wood, around which you wrap paper to make your own planter. Sure, using pots made from this press is marginally more eco-friendly than buying planters from the store. But more than anything, using a paper pot press is a soothing, uncomplicated craft project that easily consumes me for hours at a time.
Using one is simple: You take a strip of newspaper and wrap it around the press, leaving a little overhang on the top and bottom. You can tape the paper or fold it over itself on the top to secure the edge before smashing and turning the press into the base. After a few good smushes, you have yourself the perfect, biodegradable, transplantable, and incredibly inexpensive vessel for starting your seeds.
The original paper pot press, dubbed the Potmaker, came from the mind of a man named Otto Richter, the founder of Richters Herbs in Ontario, Canada. Otto was born and raised in Austria before emigrating to Canada in 1953, when he opened his own nursery and seed store. According to his son, Conrad Richter, who now runs the family business, Otto’s inspiration for the pot maker came from his upbringing in Austria, where vendors would sell cabbage seedlings at the market for people to take home and grow themselves. They would dig up the young plants and wrap the root ball in old newspaper for easy transport home. Through some experimenting with wooden dowels, Otto Richter eventually came up with the design as a resourceful and eco-friendly way to start seedlings and avoid using store-bought plastic pots. The Richters began selling paper pot presses at their store and wholesale to other seed catalogs in the late 1980s, just a few years before Otto passed away in 1991.
Since then, other manufacturers have copied the design, and you can find paper pot presses online and in many garden stores. But I feel a sense of loyalty to the original. It may not be convenient, but that’s the whole point; the hour or so I spend folding and smashing strips of cut newspaper in quiet contemplation is an hour well spent.
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