Readying my bed for a winter crop of mixed greens in the fluffy soil of last years success, I saw an opportunity to utilize another few boxes of the paper. Without the aid of a paper shredder, and not wanting to run the risk of ruining the one from the office, I settled on an alternative decomposition accelerator.

Soaking the newsprint in water for a few days before burying it a foot deep in the garden seemed reasonable. I set all the stacked paper on edge inside of six five gallon buckets. Just add water and wait served as my simple plan. This ingenious idea sent my second experiment into the FAIL column.

The expanded waterlogged paper sits stuck in the bulging once-round containers. I'm surprised the now oblong shaped plastic buckets haven't cracked. The paper is so tight, I can't even get a spade between the sheets to try to dig some out.

Whatever the case, I don't think I will be adding the contents to anything any time soon. I guess I need to pour out the water and wait a year or so until the paper dries out or add more water and see how long it takes to turn the stuff into a removable slurry.

If it's any comfort, 50 percent coffee grounds by volume doesn't work in a compost bin either.

Thanks for sharing.
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And if I can save anyone some grief, don't try laying out large sheets of newsprint all over a lawn that needs mowing and figure that running a mower over it will not only shred the paper, it will mix it with grass clippings in the hopper for direct addition in the compost.

This does not work.

I now use newspaper as a mulch in the border, cover it with grass clippings, and it lasts years.

Byw, I still had a couple of boxes of paper left. I just buried them dry under about a foot of garden soil in a raised bed. I planted lettuce and broccoli in the bed. I'm going to try to resist the temptation to check on the paper until about this time next year.

Last year I found about 8 discarded packs of newspapers (about 20 copies each) still in the plastic shrink wrap. Decided to save them to start my woodstove, because they were so much neater to stack and more predictable to use than the daily paper that I usually paw through. The only downside is that I tend to read the paper and pull out the good articles as I'm wadding it up...but now, every day, it's the same paper from September of 2011. B-o-r-i-n-g!

It turns into a dark gooey mess that doesn't even go anaerobic. It took me some months of hard turning and mixing new stuff in to turn that one around. It was awful. Every shovel full seemed to not want to come out and weighed a ton. It never looked like any worms were making any headway.

I was very happy to just spill it on the ground and spread it about a long while and a lot of work later. It seemed to take forever to get a texture other than simple dark goo.

Just don't do it.
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Well, if you put large sheets, it clogs up the mower pretty quickly, stopping the blade, and you have to flip it on its side and clean out the mess.

Now if you want to sit there and crumple each individual sheet of newspaper into a ball and place those balls about 3 feet apart on the lawn, and then tip the mower up and let it down on the ball, it will shred it pretty well, and you do this for the whole lawn, it works. As long as you don't mind having a lawn covered in fine confetti that the mower refused to pickup.

As an added bonus, as you lever up and down the mower, happily filling your grass catcher bag with shredded paper and clippings and leaving a white confetti trail behind, you may well find your Significant Other with that classic hand-on-hip pose that us compost wackos have come to know so well.

I also tried putting newspaper in a large plastic trash bin, filling it with water and a bit of nitrogen fertilizer. Thats gets pretty smelly quickly. I also tried using an electric drill with a bulb auger to pulverize the soggy newspaper into glop, then use the glop in the compost. Glop dries out, same thing as non-glopped newspaper re composting.

So newspaper covered by grass clipping mulch in the border it is.

Ask me how I know.

Reference my original post for the failed experiment. I turned a couple of the buckets upside down and let them sit. The others, I left right side up soaking in the water.

Today, three months later, I decided to check on things. I just flipped the ones soaking in water upside down and drained the water. the paper would not budge. And believe it or not, the ones that have been draining for three months didn't seem any different either, the paper was still soaking wet and still very stuck.

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. I flipped them all over, drilled holes in the bottom, flipped them right side up and added 4" of finished compost to the top. I'll try planting something in the containers and see what happens.

Great for smothering weeds too!