Recycling in the Garden

My parents rarely threw anything away. Our cupboard is full of old margarine containers used to hold leftovers and my dad always kept scraps of wood or string for use around the house. I have found some interesting ways to recycle and reuse around my own house that you may help you.

Plastic Milk Jugs I have used these to help me save time while I water my plants and water more effectively. I put a few small holes in the bottom of the bottle and fill it with water and then set it at the base of my berry bushes. The water seeps out slowly allowing the water to sink in and water deeply instead of just on the surface forcing the roots deeper in to the ground for a healthier plant.

I have also buried half gallon jugs in the ground again with holes poked in the side beside the plant and then filled it up with water and capped it. The water seeps out slowly again watering the roots of the plants and making for stronger plants.

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Home Made Mulch We have a large mulched area in our back yard and we also had a bad ice storm tear through our area which took down a lot of our trees. So we rented a chipper and went to town, in just an hour we had a lot of mulch to help cover our garden. I wouldn't recommend putting it near the house because of insects but this is at the back of our property. The money I spent on the chipper was less than the cost to have the waste hauled away.

Compost If you have house plants or a garden you probably already know the value of compost, but did you know there are ways to compost that don't involve large piles of waste and that smell? There are plenty of plans on the internet to build a worm compost bin. Worms eat your food scraps and produce great compost. I recycled two plastic storage bins to build my compost bin. As we were cleaning our out our house and eliminating junk we had extra bins.

Plastic Film Canisters Ok maybe you don't remember what these look like but cameras used to use film, and they used to come in little plastic canisters. They make great storage if you label them and we have found they make for great micro caches if you geocache. If you don't you should it is a very fun experience.

Newspaper Pots You make your seedling pots out of newspaper by folding them around an old tin can. The Newspaper will biodegrade in the soil so you don't have to spend money on cow pots or pete pots, which have their own environmental baggage.

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Comments:

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These are some good tips. I like the milk jug drip irrigation the best. However, I am a landscape professional and I would like to point out that raw (i.e. fresh) wood chips should not be used around plants. Wood chips are aged to create *mulch*. As the raw chips biodegrade they suck nitrogen out of the soil, and that creates an unfavorable environment for plant growth. They are fine for paths or play areas and if you add nitrogen and turn the pile for 6-12 months...then you will have beautiful mulch.

Posted by Mary Rex on March 13, 2009 1:17 PM

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Re-use yogurt containers for the first transplanting of your garden seedlings.

Posted by jd on March 18, 2009 9:42 AM

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I like your yogurt container idea for seedling's I also like to re-use the small individual serving stew or mac n cheese cups. There also great for the kids to use when doing art projects!

Posted by Karen on April 17, 2009 1:33 AM

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I also use old prescription bottles (the see-through brown ones) for micro-storage. Just be sure to remove the label or mark out the prescription info with a permanent black marker...

Posted by anonymous on May 18, 2009 4:07 PM

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