Choosing A Container For Your Garden: Recycled

Choosing a set of containers for your container garden can be a difficult decision with the variety of choices out there. Many people search at store after store or just go to garden centers, but forget all about the motto of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Container gradens come in all sizes - from several cubic inches of soil to several cubic yards. In this article, we'll talk about some of the containers that we use in our container gardens that work well. Feel free to use any combination of the ideas below!

Yogurt is a fun summertime snack - especially when you dip fruit in it. But what do you normally do with those yogurt cups when you're done with your snack? Have you considered adding some soil and a few seeds to grow something like cilantro or basil for your kitchen? We grow sweet basil in our yogurt cups from one of the window sills in our kitchen - meaning we never have to go far to have fresh basil available for those wonderful italian dishes we cook up.

Milk jugs have quite a variety of uses. A lot of people just end up throwing away, but we hope if you're not re-using them you're at least recycling them. One of the ways we re-use milk jugs is for our container garden. Simply take a sharp knife and while leaving the handle on the container, cut off the top of it. We usually cut down the side a little ways as well, leaving the resulting milk jug looking like a disfigured L with the handle sticking up from the rest of the container. We also re-use milk jugs in plenty of other ways, which we'll cover in other articles.

Soda pop (Coke or Pepsi, for those of you from the Southern parts of the United States) bottles also make great containers for gardening. To use a soda bottle effectively for outdoor container gardening, you'll want to cut the couple of inches off the bottle, leaving most of the bottle intact, but with a wide opening. Next, you'll fill the bottom 2 to 3 inches with rocks and stones. After that, you can either fill the spaces between the stones with sand and add another inch or so of sand, or just add your soil on top of the rocks. Sand is preferable, but not a necessity. You'll want to fill the bottle to about an inch from the top of the rim. Next, you'll add in a couple of seeds and water consistent with whatever types of seeds you've planted. When we use soda bottles, we'll typically set out a group of 20 to 25 bottles all together, with a piece of rope tied around the group to hold them together, so that none of them fall over. This ensures that the rabbits and other little creatures wandering around not only can't get to the food in the container, but that they can't knock the containers over to get to the goodies either.

If you'll just look around your kitchen, there are plenty of other containers we're sure you can be creative with to re-use as well. Part of the joy of working in the garden is taking care of the Earth and the environment around you. Why not extend that to your container gardens as well?