What Do You Re-Use, Recycle or Repurpose In, From, To, or For Your Garden?
What do you re-use, recycle or re-purpose in, from, to or for your garden?
I save up half-gallon beverage cartons; plastic tofu boxes; dairy yogurt and non-dairy "yogurt" containers; plastic tubs (8-ounce ones) from butter, margarine or other spreads or dips, put drainage holes into them, and use them for starting seeds or for transplanting seedlings into when they've outgrown their first containers..
One-gallon water jugs (donated by a friend who drinks only bottled spring water; it's a medical thing for them) become cloches to protect young plants after the labels and any adhesive residue are removed the the surface cleaned up. (And some of them become luminarias at given times of year.)
Newspaper gets used to make rounds or squares or rectangles cut to size to keep soil or soil-less mixes from washing out of containers through the drainage holes while allowing excess water to drain away. (I used to purchase fiberglass screening, and still use it for "permanent" container plantings, but for seed starting, I rely on newspapers.) For three-quart nursery pots (which do get re-used from year to year)
Newspaper also gets rolled or folded, origami style, into starter pots. It's also used as water-permeable mulch to prevent splashing of soil (and unfriendly organisms, such as early or late blight) onto stems and leaves during rains.
One of my neighbors was replacing his back stoop with a deck and fancy wooden railings, and let me have the old wrought iron rectangular railing panel: turned on its short end, it makes a trellis for shorter things than pole beans or cucumbers that nevertheless want or need some support.
Trimmings from the still too-tall privet hedge (which continues to send up new shoots from within the hedge, anyway) and from some of the shrubs at the bottom of the garden are used to build trellises, and to make "fences" to keep plants in beds from lying flat in the path of the lawn mower, and the neighborhood cats from using some soft, sandy, loose soil under the window bay of the dining room as their "convenience" away from home.
I save up half-gallon beverage cartons; plastic tofu boxes; dairy yogurt and non-dairy "yogurt" containers; plastic tubs (8-ounce ones) from butter, margarine or other spreads or dips, put drainage holes into them, and use them for starting seeds or for transplanting seedlings into when they've outgrown their first containers..
One-gallon water jugs (donated by a friend who drinks only bottled spring water; it's a medical thing for them) become cloches to protect young plants after the labels and any adhesive residue are removed the the surface cleaned up. (And some of them become luminarias at given times of year.)
Newspaper gets used to make rounds or squares or rectangles cut to size to keep soil or soil-less mixes from washing out of containers through the drainage holes while allowing excess water to drain away. (I used to purchase fiberglass screening, and still use it for "permanent" container plantings, but for seed starting, I rely on newspapers.) For three-quart nursery pots (which do get re-used from year to year)
Newspaper also gets rolled or folded, origami style, into starter pots. It's also used as water-permeable mulch to prevent splashing of soil (and unfriendly organisms, such as early or late blight) onto stems and leaves during rains.
One of my neighbors was replacing his back stoop with a deck and fancy wooden railings, and let me have the old wrought iron rectangular railing panel: turned on its short end, it makes a trellis for shorter things than pole beans or cucumbers that nevertheless want or need some support.
Trimmings from the still too-tall privet hedge (which continues to send up new shoots from within the hedge, anyway) and from some of the shrubs at the bottom of the garden are used to build trellises, and to make "fences" to keep plants in beds from lying flat in the path of the lawn mower, and the neighborhood cats from using some soft, sandy, loose soil under the window bay of the dining room as their "convenience" away from home.