Planting Supplies Created from Used Materials 

Contributed by Ingrid Sunar and Doreen Coyne, members of The Richmond Hill Garden & Horticultural Society

This article focuses on amazing things you can do with materials you find around your house which you might otherwise discard. Let your inner crafter out while saving dollars to grow plants!

Your own bird feeder

Holding an empty plastic bottle in front of you with the lid on, punch a hole straight through from one side to the other about an inch or 2 inches down from the lid of the bottle.

Use a piece of wire (perhaps a part of an old hanger) to slide through those holes and then bring it up and around to the top twisting them together to form a hanger for what it's going to become your bird feeder. Lower down on the bottle, punch a hole from one side to the opposite end thread a pencil through the hole. The pencil ends become the perch for your birds. You can optionally do another set of holes slightly below that, and 90 degrees over for another perch.

Above each pencil entry to the bottle cut a small semi-circle about the size of a dime or nickel. The holes will allow the bird to reach in to get seeds. To finish your bird feeder, just fill the bottle with seeds, put the lid back on and hang it up.  It will be great to see the finches visit the planter during this fall and winter.

Saving seeds

After you dry your seeds having harvested them from your plants, you can store them in an envelope. Be sure to do this for unused seeds you bought as well. No need to buy envelopes as you likely get lots of these in your bills and requests for donations each month.

Date and label these including both the type of seed and colour of flower.

An alternate idea is to put your seeds into empty Tic Tac containers which can then be labelled appropriately.

Labeling herbs

Save wine bottle corks and label them with the name of the plants or herbs that you are growing in individual pots indoors this winter. Then skewer the cork to either a metal or wooden skewer, a chopstick, or a discarded metal or plastic fork.

Garden tools

In a prior article, we told you how to turn a small, 1 litre jug into a watering can or a scoop. Note that the scoop could also be used this winter to get salt out of its bag and then spread it onto the sidewalks.