Tater wrote:

I am planning some modified sqare foot gardening and am looking for
some advice......

in researching lasangna gardening they use newpapers in layers with
organic material to create some planting medium.

anyway......I am planning on filling my garden beds with a lot of waste
paper as i can find, but i might be comming up short. I plan to fill
the topmost part with commercial potting soil.

I was thinking, the local thrift store sells grocery bags full of
paperbacks for cheap, and was wondering if i cold use this stuff as
filler/drainiage/wick/moisture holding material. anyone have some
thoughts?


Well, normally, you would want to avoid the slick/colorful colred paper
material. Due to plasticizers and maybe dye made with metallic
salts/oxides. But, the use of 5-6-7 layers of newspaper, or even
cardboard, is to kill the grass at the location you want to create the
bed. Use of Roundup before placing compost or topsoil,etc. in the are
would work about as well. I suspect the interior pages of paperback
books would degrade about the same as newspaper OF THE SAME NUMBER OF
LAYERS, but most of those books are too thick in their normal form -
even if opened in the center and layed out. I suppose, if the paperbacks
were beneath quite a few inches of soil, such that they did not
interfere with plantiing, it might be OK. But at that point, one wonders
if that much thickness of soil would'nt be sufficient to kill the grass
anyway.

Here's my humble attempt at a modified lasagna-type bed construction;
http://davesgarden.com/forums/t/651950/#new

I do think, if the covers were torn off first, shredding paperbacks and
placing them in a compost pile would be OK. Not sure what kinda adhesive
is in the spine though.

Carl


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