Spring cleaning sees a multitude of potential garden goodies turning up at the recycling centre or the op shop. For the creative amongst us, these items are treasures! Turn your yard or your balcony into a garden fantasy today, with our recycling suggestions, below.
Turning the tables
To create a shallow raised garden bed on legs, remove the top section from a salvaged kitchen table. Flip the top over, and fix the legs back on to the top of the table. Shallow beds work well with strawberries, spinach, lettuce, and leafy Asian greens.
Breeze block edging
Breeze blocks are rectangular concrete bricks with cavities– and they are readily found at demo yards (often slightly damaged, but who’s to know when the damaged section is embedded in the ground!). Breeze blocks make the perfect garden edging, but their value is doubled when they are placed on their side, and the cavities are filled with soil. What you have is a low wall of perfect planting pockets for herbs and annuals, or little trailing plants, such as Lobelia and Aubretia, that spill over the edge of the brick to soften their appearance.
Drain pipe pea planter
Peas resent moving home. Once they’re seedlings, they like to stay put! If you don’t have space in the garden, and want a temporary home for them, use the drainpipe holding method. Saw a polythene drainpipe in half, lengthwise. Drill holes in the base of the half-pipe. Block each end with plastic tape, and fill the space with growing medium. Sow your peas into it. Once your peas are growing, and you have space for them in your garden, make a long depression in the soil, remove the plastic tape from the end of your pipe-planter, and ease the seedlings into the space you’ve created. Disturbance to roots will be minimal!
Vintage-look storage
Not everyone has a potting shed, but we can all aspire to a potting bench. Choose an old bench-high cupboard from the recycling centre. Paint the top surface with several coats of paint to create a waterproof surface. Hammer some nails or fix some screw to the side of the cupboard to hold hand tools. Keep pots, tags and gardening gloves in drawers or cupboards. It doesn’t matter if the furniture only lasts for a season – you’ll have extended its life, and there will always be another piece to salvage next year!
Annual planters
Planters don’t have to last forever, and(avoid growing edibles in containers which may contain toxic materials – you don’t want nasties leaching into your growing medium or food). Cute planters include old hand bags (paint them up, fill them with soil, and hang them from the branch of a tree or a fence paling). Sew up the legs of shorts and jeans, and fill them with soil, too! The garment planter can be tacked to a wall, or propped up on a stake. Hessian coffee bean bags, and even upturned straw hats will grow plants for a season.
Follow the sun
We don’t all have the luxury of a garden that receives all day sun – but when you make your garden moveable, you can follow the heat! Look out for op-shop baskets with handles still firmly attached, fill with potting mix, and plant. When the shadows begin to fall, move your garden to the sunny side of the section!
Recycling in the garden isn’t just fun – it’s a creative art form. Enjoy!
