Gardening

Top Recycling Tips for the Garden

Ill.: yusufdemirci, depositphotos

By Justin Osborne

Garden shops are excellent, but if you’re living on a budget or want to be environmentally friendly, you can recycle anything from cans and bottles to mason jars. You can then utilize these items to help with your outdoor projects. So, if you must survive on a budget but don’t want to give up gardening, you could expand your supplies by following this expert advice. 

  1. Your Furniture
Wooden box painted for use as a plant container.

Anything from old cabinets to bathtubs, basins, and toilets may be used to create enormous pots for your plants. Some folks showcase their plants in buckets, chimney flue pipes, and vehicle tires. It depends on your taste. 

Get some of your old containers and drill some holes on the base/bottom. You can then decorate the containers in the colors of your choice before planting plants. Any vintage containers could potentially be used as plant pots, so pick something that looks good to you. For example, you could use wood boxes for yours.

  1. Composter 

Creating your personal compost is an excellent approach to enhance your garden and make it last longer. To get started, you need a compost bin, which you can make out of old floorboards quite easily. Or you can stack four pallets on their edges and tie them with gardening ropes, as Kenny, gardener and freelancer working for the best essay writing service agrees. The compost will be able to breathe through the spaces in the wood strips, while the rope can keep it from wandering around and ending up all over your garden. 

  1. Plastic Cans and Bottles
Cloche made from a plastic bottle.

When it comes to recycling cans and bottles in your garden, one of the best options would be turning them into bell-shaped covers called cloches. To protect your sprouts from bad winters, slugs, and bugs, simply cut the bottoms off your cans and bottles and place them over your plants. When the plants reach the point when they can touch the cloche’s sides, it’s time to take the bottles down. You should leave the cap of the bottle off to ensure that your seedlings can breathe; if not, they could end up with a fungal disease, which is not at all pleasant. 

  1. Improvising Cold Frames 
Cold frames are easy to build from old planks and a recycled window sash. Photo: alho007, depositphotos

If you’ve got lots of different crops in your garden, installing cold frames to shelter them from the cold can quickly add up. If you don’t want to spend too much money on this, you could manufacture your own cold frames by using glass tops from abandoned windows. 

Even though these frames might seem bulkier, you will see that double-layered panels provide excellent frost insulation for your plants, according to Dana Lebowski, essay writer and gardener. This is an excellent job to do in summer because many people update their windows during this season, so start working on it early on. You will need the frames to protect sensitive plants from the months of September/October to early spring.

  1. Make Your Own Plant Waterers
Bottles with pierced lids used to water container gardens. Photo: Raffmaster, depositphotos

If you have a tiny garden, you may discover that spraying water over your plants with a large watering can is a challenging process. Simply punch few holes in an empty plastic bottle lid to address this drawback; then, use it to water your plants. The bottle will be small enough to fit on the side of your tiny garden and makes watering your veggies a little easier.

  1. Innovative Bird Scarers
DVD bird scarer.

Everything is becoming digital today, so using your DVD collection for gardening is not a bad idea. Reuse all of your disks by turning them into gleaming bird scarers that clang in the breeze. Simply tie them to separate ropes and hang them from a clothesline over any areas you wish the birds to stay away from. They’ll be gone in a hot minute, and you’ll save lots of money. Win-win!

  1. Build Your Own Bathtub Pond 
Water garden made from a sunken bathtub. Photo: wwwrockrose.blogspot.com

Bathtubs can be useful in a variety of settings, but who knew that creating a pond would be one of them? Pick a location in your garden, dig a hole, and then place the tub in it. This way, you will create a small habitat in your body of water that will ideally attract frogs and toads and they will help keep slugs away. 

You could add some pond vegetation to help the water stay clean, as well as some pieces of wood for the frogs to utilize when entering and exiting your slick-sided bathtub pond. Your kids will undoubtedly like studying the pond, so it can be a terrific opportunity to teach them more about the environment. Just make sure you secure the pond to avoid any incidents that could arise.

Wrapping Up

Reduce, reuse, recycle! Many individuals mistakenly believe that this mantra only entails taking their cardboard and bottles to the nearest recycling center. However, this is not necessarily true. Reusing is more beneficial to the planet than going through the entire recycling process. So, if you’re a resourceful gardener who is putting this into effect, congratulations! Keep it up and share some advice below!

About the Author

Justin Osborne is an essay writer. He loves to share his thoughts and opinions about education, writing and blogging with other people on different blogs and forums. Currently, he is working as a content marketer at best essay writing service.

Garden writer and blogger, author of 65 gardening books, lecturer and communicator, the Laidback Gardener, Larry Hodgson, passed away in October 2022. Known for his great generosity, his thoroughness and his sense of humor, he reached several generations of amateur and professional gardeners over his 40-year career. Thanks to his son, Mathieu Hodgson, and a team of contributors, laidbackgardener.blog will continue its mission of demystifying gardening and making it more accessible to all.

4 comments on “Top Recycling Tips for the Garden

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  2. suman rajput

    I like this article for the inside and out empowering substance and awesome correspondence. I got so pulled in with this material that I was unable to quit taking a gander at.

  3. Some great ideas. I discovered the CD bird deterrent a couple years ago, and have been using it successfully over my strawberries. I find it very funny to see my old photoshop CD’s, which probably set me back several thousand dollars, happily spinning over my berries keeping them save.

  4. Interesting ideas. Use 2L pop bottles inserted into Lee Valley plant spikes to water my greenhouse tomatoes. Works like a charm.

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