Build a Newspaper Pot Maker Tool for $6
One twenty-minute build and you'll never buy a plastic seed tray again
If you're still buying plastic seed starting trays every spring and quietly throwing them away at the end of the season, this is the project that ends that cycle for good. A newspaper pot maker is just a short wooden dowel with a circular base disc glued to one end — and it lets you roll unlimited free seedling pots from the Sunday paper in seconds each. The finished pots are genuinely sturdy enough to hold up through weeks of watering, and when transplant time comes you skip the whole rootball-handling ordeal entirely — pot goes straight into the ground, newspaper dissolves, roots grow through without missing a beat. The tool itself costs about $6 in materials and takes twenty minutes to build. One afternoon of effort buys you free seed starting for the rest of your gardening life.
What You Need
- Wood dowel, 1½" diameter, cut to 5" length — found at any hardware or craft store (~$2–3 for a full length you'll cut down)
- Scrap wood or craft wood disc, 3" diameter, ¼–½" thick — a scrap offcut works perfectly, or buy a pre-cut wood disc (~$1–2)
- Wood glue — standard PVA wood glue is fine (~$4 a bottle, lasts indefinitely)
- Sandpaper, 120-grit — to smooth the dowel end and disc for a clean bond
- Clamp or heavy book — to hold the joint while glue dries
- Handsaw or miter saw — to cut the dowel to length if not pre-cut
- Newspaper — broadsheet pages cut into roughly 5"×12" strips for rolling
- Seed starting mix — for filling finished pots
How to Build & Use It
- Cut your dowel to 5 inches long — this length gives you a comfortable handle grip while keeping the form compact enough to roll pots quickly. Sand both ends smooth.
- Sand the center of one flat face of your wood disc and the corresponding end of the dowel with 120-grit paper to rough up the surfaces. Wood glue bonds to wood fiber, not to smooth sealed surfaces, so this step directly determines how sturdy your tool ends up.
- Apply a generous, even coat of wood glue to both sanded surfaces, then press the disc firmly and squarely onto the end of the dowel. Wipe away any squeeze-out immediately with a damp cloth.
- Clamp or weight the joint and let it cure fully — at least one hour for handling, ideally overnight before putting the tool to work. A rushed bond is the one thing that will make this tool fail.
- Cut your newspaper into strips approximately 5 inches wide and 12 inches long. One broadsheet page yields several strips, so a single Sunday paper stocks you for an entire season of starting.
- Roll a newspaper strip around the dowel starting about 2 inches above the disc end, overlapping the paper two to three times for a sturdy wall. Hold the roll lightly — tight enough to stay in place, loose enough to slide off cleanly.
- Fold the excess paper at the disc end down and over the disc face, creasing it in sections the way you'd wrap a round gift. Press the folded base firmly against a flat surface to set the bottom of the pot.
- Slide the finished pot off the dowel — it should release easily — then fill immediately with seed starting mix, which helps the pot hold its shape. Set pots snugly together in a tray so they support each other as they dampen and swell slightly.
Market gardeners who rely on newspaper pots at scale always bottom-water their seedling trays rather than watering from above — they set the whole tray in two inches of water and let the pots absorb moisture upward through the paper base. This keeps the pot walls dry and dramatically extends how long they hold their shape before transplant time, which matters when you're starting seeds six to eight weeks out. It also encourages roots to grow downward toward moisture rather than circling the pot walls, which means stronger root systems and less transplant stress when the pots go in the ground.
