9 Creative Ways to Upcycle Household Items into Garden Essentials

With gardening season upon us, you may be itching to scope out your local garden center for new tools, supplies, and plants. However, before you spend money on new gardening tools, you may want to take a look through your home to see what can be upcycled instead.

​From wine bottles to PVC pipes, you’d be surprised at what can be reused from your home. Ahead, our experts share their best tips for recycling or upcycling some of the most common household items into gardening tools you can’t live without.

Old Tires

An old tire can make a fantastic DIY raised garden bed, says Emily Auffrey, a home and garden DIY content creator who regularly upcycles household items. Utilizing an old tire is an "eco-friendly upcycle," she says. "Put a garden tarp down and soil, and there's a container garden." However, you may want to limit what you grow in an old tire to non-edible plants.

Wine Bottles

Making sure your plants are watered while you’re away is easier than you think. Simply repurpose an old wine bottle as a water spike. "Wash your wine bottles thoroughly, fill them with water, and then attach a self-watering stake to the top and place it upside down in the soil," says Angelika Zaber, a lawn and garden expert with Online Turf. "This way, your plants will receive a slow and steady supply of water."

​If you don’t have self-watering stakes handy (or the time to snag one), Zaber recommends using the wine bottle’s cork as a self-watering measure. Simply drill a small hole in the top of the cork to allow water to drip slowly.

Tiffany-Style Lamp Shades

Stained glass lampshades are beautifully intricate and colorful and can be a great way to elevate plain pots or containers. Simply pop a nursery planter inside the shade and voila—instant beauty. Auffrey notes that she especially loves displaying native wildflowers inside, but really, any plant will do.

DIY Ollas

Ollas are unglazed terracotta pots that are buried in your garden and filled with water. Terracotta is very porous, meaning water slowly seeps out of the pot and into the soil, providing consistent moisture to the soil and roots around it.

If you have old terracotta planters lying around, give this trick a try. Fill the pot with water and bury it in the soil so just the lip is exposed. "The water will absorb out of the pot into the soil as the soil dries. This is less watering for you to do," Auffrey says. To help local pollinators, she recommends putting the pot’s saucer on top of the pot and filling it with water for bees to drink from.

Colanders

Colanders make great natural planters since they have built-in drainage holes. "Colanders are often found in thrift shops and are one of the best household items to repurpose as pots or hanging baskets," says Zaber. "They offer excellent drainage because of their drainage holes."

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PVC Pipes

Garden dibblers are tools that are used to make consistent holes in the soil so you can plant seeds, seedlings, or bulbs. But, if you don’t have one handy, an old stick of PVC pipe will do in a pinch to carefully carve out soil indentations.

Egg Cartons

Don’t purchase seed-starting containers—just take a quick look through your fridge instead. Staci Hill, co-author of The Preserver’s Garden, says there are plenty of things in your kitchen you can use for seed-starting, such as egg cartons, toilet paper tubes, and newspaper pots. Poke drainage holes into the bottom of your containers before planting any seeds so water can escape.

​Copper Pennies

With pennies no longer in circulation, you may find yourself with a surplus of old coins. And if your pennies were minted before 1982, they’re made with real copper. One garden pest who can’t handle copper pennies? Slugs. When slugs come into contact with copper, they experience a mild electric shock that will deter them from your garden. Take your old copper pennies and line your garden beds or planters with them to keep these pests at bay.

Cardboard

Cardboard can be used for sheet mulching, a no-till gardening technique that applies layers of organic materials on top of the soil to suppress weeds, add nutrients, and generally create fertile soil. Use old cardboard boxes that are free from ink, paint, or tape as a base layer. As the cardboard decomposes, it adds nitrogen right back into the soil.