Free containers

I'm sure most of you, like me, still buy many of your groceries and other household requirements at a supermarket or traditional shop. Whether we like it or not, many of the goods we buy come in plastic containers. These tend to get thrown in the dustbin when they are empty, and usually end up in landfill somewhere, with all the consequent negative effects on our fragile environment. The sad fact is that if we just thought a little more about it, we could use these containers for loads of other purposes...

We gardeners always need containers for lots of things - seed-trays and plant-pots being the most obvious ones. It can cost a fair bit of money to buy new seed-trays and plant pots from a Garden Centre, so why not consider reusing some of those plastic containers from the groceries, that would otherwise go to waste?

I have shown you this one before - a butter tub being used for growing cress:-

Here are some more ideas for you.

An old washing-up bowl can be used as a harvesting receptacle.



Or as a deep seed-tray.

Here are some containers from Pelleted Chicken Manure being used as pots for growing tomatoes

Some other containers that are going to be put to good use in my garden include:

This plastic biscuit box, which will become a nice deep (approx 6") growing-container for Baby Leaf Salad, or Corn Salad, or even radishes. (No chance of losing this one in the gloomy weather, eh?)

This large 1-kilogramme Margarine tub, which will be a seed-tray.

These 284ml (10 fl oz) cream cartons will provide perfect deep pots for tomato seedlings. Obviously the normal little yoghurt pots also make ideal individual plant modules, but with a pot this tall you can plant a seedling really deeply, thus promoting beneficial additional root growth from the stem.

This shallow 175g paté tub will be a good one for growing Mustard-and-Cress on the windowsill.

And what about making individual plant modules from cut-down milk bottles. Most people use loads of these, and they are easy to cut using a sturdy pair of kitchen scissors.

And don't let's forget the traditional use of the surplus egg-carton: keeping seed potatoes upright during chitting.

This can be done with polystyrene ones too, but the cardboard ones like that in the picture above have the added benefit of being compostable.

Even when one of my plastic compost bins was broken by a falling fence in a gale, I was able to salvage part of it and convert it into a tub for growing Marrows.

OK, I've shown you lots of my Reuse ideas. I'm sure that many of my readers will have some equally good ideas, so who else is prepared to share them with us? 

P.S. Have a look at this great idea from David Offut's blog - In The Garden