The Great 'Re-use from the house into the garden' Hunt

jap200

tenuissent wrote:

Newspaper and cardboard. Lay thickly on field grass to supress the weeds and grass while you dig out your new allotment. Lay thickly between raspberry bushes to supress weeds. Lay thickly anywhere you might otherwise use Mypex woven plastic at £0.95 a metre (a metre wide). If you can't bear the look of it, add thin layer of woodchips/straw/soil.
/anything you can bear the look of.

Thanks to Angie Loves Veg for posting some fantasticly clear instructions that she found for making newspaper posts - origami fashion. They are brilliant - you can make a variety of sizes simply by starting with bigger or smaller pieces of paper.
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=358126&highlight=newspaper

They would save you around £2 per pack of biodegradable (jiffy) pots.

Also - my own suggestion:

1. Old Net curtains
2. Use to protect vegetable and fruit plants from insects and birds - you may need to support on bamboo poles for some plants.
3. Saves around £17 compared to 2 X 4m environmesh (fine mesh netting)

jap200

Wiggly_Worm wrote:

...Our washing machine blew itself up last year in a particularly spectacular and scary way, so being the anti-wasters that we are, instead of chucking the whole thing into landfill, we took it apart. The door window made a lovely glass salad bowl, the drum we use as a brazier in the garden, and the outer case is a small 'shed' next to the compost heap. Not the prettiest thing in the world, but it's dry storage for large garden tools (not expensive ones!), flower pots and other bits and bobs. The bits which did get thrown away only filled a large orange juice carton - not bad :T

Wow - I thought I was a good recycler - but this is truely impressive. For anyone else wanting to try this, I found this site which suggests using the glass bowl for cooking as it is made of Pyrex http://www.zyra.org.uk/washbowl.htm

However - as we are on the gardening thread here - how about using it as a bird bath! My machine is quite new, so I may have to resort to taking my srewdrives down to the local tip to see if I can get myself one.

Primrose

5 litre mineral water bottles. When empty, saw off the bottoms.They make marvellous individual cloches to protect young tomato plants, courgettes, etc. Just slip them over the top of the tomato pole to anchor them, or put a cane through the top and you don't have to worry about being caught out by late frosts. A set of 3 similar plastic bell-shaped cloches in garden centres cost around £9.

Aril

Use old polysterene broken up into bits to fill pots so you don't use as much compost. Compost bags are good for lining pots as they help retain the moisture and for filling with fallen leaves to make leaf mulch. Little glass jars [yogurt ones] can be filled with candles as used as night lights in the summer.
Aril

Deb_Williams

I drink a prio-biotic each day. The little bottles are ideal for the tops of pea-canes etc - saves taking someone's eye out!

:T :T :T

Deb_Williams

Nearly forgot.

When we re-fitted our kitchen, I saved a load of the old broken wall tiles (enough to fill an old washing-up bowl) for plant-pot drainage. We're doing the bathroom later this year, so I just might replenish the bowl!!

Another use for old washing up bowls - I use one in the greenhouse to decant potting compost from those enormous sacks when I'm dealing with seedlings etc. Much easier to handle!

poohbear59

I asked my local garage for old van or lorry tyres and stacked them up to make potato and strawberry planters. They even paid me to take them away!
My old teapot that lost its lid became a herb planter, I put an old pair of jeans on top of my worms in my wormery composter and all that was left were the zip, studs and the threads from the stitching! I also get old carpet samples from shops, use them in the house, as door mats, until start to get too dirty them place on top of compost.
I gave away the bricks from inside an old storage radiator to a family who are building and outdoor bread oven!

Mary_Hartnell

cornerclose wrote:

If you are replacing a carpet you can use the old one as a weed supressing mulch instead of the usual plastic. This works well around shrubs and trees which are out of sight, and pieces can be put around cabbages etc which also helps keep out cabbage root fly. It won't stop the perennial weeds like ground elder and convolvulus but its great for supressing the annuals, and helps conserve water too.

I've also used old carpet to cover compost which is rotting. It stops the birds pulling it about and again keeps moisture in.

Garden centres charge a fortune for pond liners.
Mr H and I built a large pond by digging a hole and lining it with a sandwich of old nylon carpets, large cheap polythene sheet(the black sort farmers use to cover silage), then a top layer of more old nylon carpets. The above ground edges were held down with turf ontop of the carpet. Within a year it looked completely natural. Within a few years all sorts of rushes, willows and silver birch trees had self seeded. Frogs toads newts introduced themselves. All sorts of dragon/damsel flies and pond skating beetles arrive by air !
We introduced some reed mace and yellow iris found floating after the clearance of a local dyke (probably illegal so don't tell anyone!).

You do have to rake it out each year or the reeds and dead stuff would take over, it is amazing how much soggy stuff there is to fill the compost bins made of pallets from the local industrial estate.
Now 20 years later we have had to harvest some fire wood to stop it getting completely overgrown.

The heron comes and harvests some of the residents.
We even had a silly pair of ducks one year who tried to nest (until next door's dog got them, but the owner did make amends by giving us a cutting from her white water lily).

Great education for kids who have learned to swim, though not as dangerous as a hard edged pond with a curb round it.

CU

Mary.

Mary_Hartnell

Seakay wrote:

Plastic drinks bottles or milk bottles can be used as watering resovoirs for tomato plants etc. Take off the top and cut off the bottom and bury the bottle upsidedown when you put the seedling in; leave at least half an inch of bottle above soil level to avoid the bottle getting filled up.
This makes it easy to deliver water and plant food directly to the plant.
I've not seen a commercial version of this, so it's hard to say how much money is saved.

Now that you have compost bins full of pond gunge, old newspapers from the kids rabbit hutch etc. Plant marrows, corgettes, pumpkins, vegetable spagetti etc on top, each one with a COUPLE of drip irrigators made from 1.5/2 lt drink bottles, pierced cap down, bottom sliced off. Fertilize via the drip feeders, solid or liquid ("P" is useful well worth a penny !).

Keeping the plants alive forces you to water the compost, the big leaves disguise the maturing compost and the produce is good (organic ?) healthy free food.
Meanwhile build a new bin attached to the maturing one with 3 more pallets.

Mary_Hartnell

Do we all know how to take a bald tyre, stilll on its (damaged ?) rim; cut through one of the two side walls about 2/3rds of the distance from the rim to the tread, right the way round.

Then, this bit can be a struggle, turn it inside out. You have a round planter with a smooth outside (tread is now inside) standing on a nifty circular rubber foot.
Paint to suit.

Alternatively, if the tyre is nolonger on the rim, take a short section of plank.
Stand the tyre on the plank, remove 2/3rds of the side walls and one third of the tread. Bend back the two flaps of tread and tuck them under the bottom of what is left of the tyre. Nail through the tyre, the flaps of tread, and into the plank.

You now have a sort of flower basket with two rings of rubber covered steel beading, for picking it up. Tie these together. Paint to taste. Fill with the compost made above and plant out.

Mary.

It costs at least 1 GBP to get rid of a bald tyre, that is why you find so many fly tipped these days. The Dutch are using theirs to make a road (re)surfacing
carpet. It makes roads quiet in residential areas (a superior form of the stuff you find round kiddies swings).