Hot Off the Press: Read About Perfect Soil Mate

If you are growing only a few plants in pots or containers, you can probably afford to buy your potting soil at the local nursery or supermarket.

Most likely it will be of some organic material, possibly taken up from a forest floor, some perlite thrown in, some fertilizer added, given a name, like the “Good Earth,” put in packages and hustled on the soil-mix shelves.

I’ve bought “Good Earth”-type products, and always with good results. But I was using so many packages that my retirement pay began to sound an alarm. I needed a cheaper potting soil.

I had been using shredded newspapers (cut up in a hand-powered shredder), with good results, as a mulch for my roses, fruit trees and tomato plants. I lay it down to a depth of three inches. It won’t blow about, it doesn’t look like newspapers, rainfall or irrigation goes right through it, it suppresses weeds and keeps the soil cool.

I figured newspapers would also make a good organic source for a potting soil. But what should I mix with them?

Why not lawn grass clippings? I wondered. A perfect use for two discarded items--newspapers and grass clippings.

I mixed the two together and placed the mixture in a composter. Several weeks later, I began putting the half-rotted newspaper and grass clippings through my hand-powered rotary sieve. This is where the “Sissons Growing Mix” was really born.

The mere addition of some perlite and a helping of fertilizer to the shredded newspaper/grass clippings was all that was necessary to make a first-class potting mix.

The Sissons Growing Mix is light, spongy and produces a medium in which the roots run rampant.

But I was worried that the gardener, while finding the newspaper potting mix very attractive, may perhaps pass it by because of the tedium of making it.

Fate stepped in. The company (Kinsman Co., Point Pleasant, Pa.) that had supplied me with the hand-powered shredder sent me a package of newspaper shredded with their Steinmax electric chipper with a leaf shredder attachment. I began to use the Steinmax chipper in 1983. Gone is the hand-powered shredding of newspapers. Gone too is the laborious work of pushing the half-rotted newspaper through the hand-powered sieve.

Perhaps I had better take you, step by step, through the whole process:

I dunk the newspapers for at least an overnight soaking in a tub of water. Then, taking a newspaper section, half folded and wet, it is very simple to rip it lengthwise into strips from 2 to 3 inches wide.

Having amassed quite a pile of wet newspaper strips, I plug in the machine (ordinary house current) and introduce the wet newspaper strips, one at a time, to the spinning blades. I fix a plastic sack under the spout to catch the chewed-up result.

In no time at all, there is enough soggy, shredded newsprint that the time has come to mix it with an equal amount of grass clippings. I turn the mixture into a compost bin for five weeks.

Next comes the admixture of 2 cubic feet of composted newspaper/grass clippings with 4 dry quarts of perlite (available at any nursery) and the 3 ounces of dry fertilizer. To get a cubic foot of mixture, you can use a cardboard box or other container measuring 12 by 12 by 12 inches.

Using five-gallon containers, I have grown my own tomatoes in my newspaper mix since 1984. The plants have no contact whatever with real soil. I decided, however, in 1987 that although my wife and I were eating tomatoes grown in the Los Angeles Times, there was the question of the unknown ink, so I figured I had better check with them in case there was something I didn’t know, but should. The Times wrote back, giving their ink a clean bill of health.

Here I would like to counter the claim that because grass clippings are used that the resulting compost has an unpleasant odor. That allegation is entirely false. Grass clipping in other compost may smell unpleasantly although I have never had it brought to my attention--but mixed with shredded newspaper, it doesn’t.

And you cannot overwater with this planting mix. I place a wick (made of non-rotting synthetic rope) protruding from two opposite drain holes in the base of the pot. I water from the top until the plants are well established and the saucer holds the water that drains out of the pot, and the wick feeds it back again when the plant needs it.

After the plants are established, I water from the bottom in the saucer, using a weak solution of liquid fertilizer. (What about the mosquito larva that breeds in stagnant water, you might ask. I have found that the weak solution of fertilizer water is enough to stop the adult from laying eggs.)

The only reason I put the name Sissons before the product, which after all you could make yourself, is in dedication to myself for a 10-year battle getting the problems solved, and there have been many, some of them being my own limitations. I had a stroke in 1976 that has left me somewhat incapacitated.

Consider this: What if the mass of newspapers in this country alone, every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, could be processed, much as I am doing, into organic matter and be plowed into the earth?

The land would rejoice!