Amended to improve drainage and fertility. This stuff
has good water retention, and you can't beat the cost.
Anyone tried this?

In article ,
Father Haskell wrote:
Amended to improve drainage and fertility. This stuff
has good water retention, and you can't beat the cost.
Anyone tried this?

It won't improve fertility because it contains no plant nutrients and
requires nitrogen to break down, although the nitrogen is released
eventually. In my garden (Toronto, Ontario) it breaks down in a year
or less when I use newspaper as mulch and then bury it. Unlike natural
woody material, paper is cellulose with the lignins removed. Lignins are
huge complicated molecules that last a very long time and form humus.
Cellulose is metabolized by fungi and other microbes completely.

That said, it will improve tilth for a while at least, but you really
need more long lasting material to substantially improve heavy soils.
I gather the bags of leaves my neighbors put out for pickup and after
a good many years I've converted a soil that's basically a gooey nearly
pure silt to something approximating fluffy, at least when it's not too
wet or dry. Sawdust is good stuff too, as long as you get it from a
mill, and are aware that it too takes up nitrogen as it's broken down.
Sawdust from a lumber yard may contain material from treated lumber which
can permanently contaminate your garden with arsenic and other toxic
metals. You might also try green manure crops. Annual grasses and grains
have immense ramifying root systems that greatly improve crumb texture.
Deep rooted plants like sweet clover drill down as much as several feet
to break up hardpan and improve drainage. It's not unreasonable to
experiment with this in small areas of a few square meters.

Upshot -- paper is better than nothing, but the effect lasts only a year
or so and will compete with your crop for nitrogen.

You may get more and better answers in rec.gardens.