Recycling and Planting
A version of this article first appeared in The Local Answer magazine Spring 2019 entitled Recycling in the garden – novel ideas for planting.
What to plant?
As soon as Spring started here, as we do every year, we began planting seeds. We tend to plant vegetables, herbs and salad, which really helps us to cut down on the plastic packaging we are usually inundated with from the supermarket. Currently we have lettuce, chives and tomatoes starting, with cucumber and rocket waiting to go in as the cold snap was a little harsh. Recently, instead of buying new plastic pots, we have been looking at ways of recycling the things we already have, reusing them to plant in. Then when they are ready, we can put them out into our raised beds, see our tutorials to making them here.
Which items are good for recycling?
Lots of the plastic tubs that food comes in, grapes and tomatoes for example, are perfect as they already have holes for draining in. Any plastic containers that don’t are easily converted using a skewer to carefully poke some holes in the bottom. (One for the adults to do if you are planting with kids!) You can also cut one panel out of plastic milk bottles and lie them on their sides. Egg boxes are brilliant as you can have individual seedings in each section and they can be planted directly into the soil, just make sure you are using the paper variety. You can also use the inner core of toilet rolls, just stack them tightly in a tray and fill with compost and plant individual seeds in them, when they are ready to be transferred, you can plant them straight into the soil.
How to re-use food waste.
If you have egg boxes, chances are that you also have egg shells, you can plant into these too, just make a small drainage hole in the bottom. A particularly fun one for children is to let them draw a face on the shell in non-toxic pens and then plant cress in them for hair. Once done with, you can crush the shell up to add to the soil for extra drainage, true recycling. You can also easily turn newspaper pages into pots, either using a stapler, or if you want to plant them out, you can secure them using a little flour and water paste glue.
Coffee lover?
For coffee lovers with machines that produce grounds, another brilliant idea for recycling is mixing the grounds into the compost as they are full of nitrates and act as a brilliant fertilizer. And finally, what about all these bags that the compost comes in? Well if you open them carefully and then poke some holes in the bottom when they are empty, you can use them to grow potatoes or onions in.
What to do with it after?
So not only are you not adding to your annual waste product production by not buying new plastic pots or your fruit and veg in containers, you are re-using any that you do have, and once they are done with, you can either plant them in the case of the egg boxes, put them away for next year or wash them out and recycle them as usual.
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