Ways To Use Household Rubbish in the Garden

Maintaining a beautiful garden and growing some of your own food is just one element of living a more sustainable life. Reducing the amount of waste that has to be sent to landfill is another way to live a greener life. Fortunately, recycling and re-using goes hand in hand with organic gardening. This month, as you begin to garden again in earnest after the winter months, do not spend money that you do not need to on gardening equipment. Instead, think about how you can use your household's rubbish in your garden in a variety of ingenious ways. Here are just a few examples of the uses to which your rubbish can be put:

Enriching the soil:

Most gardeners will already be composting much of their household's food waste. If you are new to gardening, a good composting system is absolutely essential. This is a way to create a product that can enrich your soil and ensure that your garden is not depleted of vital nutrients. March is a good time to add compost to your beds – all the better if it is your own.

Seed Germination:

If you would like to grow your own vegetables for the first time this year, now is the time to germinate a range of seeds indoors on your window sills. For seeds that like a higher heat to germinate, you can make a makeshift propagator using clear plastic food trays to cover your growing medium and place the whole thing in a warm spot. Toilet roll tubes or newspapers make the ideal little pots for plants whose roots should not be disturbed when they are planted out in their final growing positions.

Potting and Containers:

Do not go out and buy a raft of plastic pots to grow things in when the likelihood is that you aleady have plenty of plastic coming into your home already as food and drinks packaging. You can pierce drainage holes in yogurt pots and margarine tubs and the like and use these as pots to hold your seedlings before they are transplanted outside. Plastic and metal packaging can be re-used in the garden as containers in a number of different ways. Milk bottles with holes pricked in the lids make good watering cans, which is another good example of the variety of ways in which this sort of rubbish can be used.

Protection and Cloches:

Lots of plastic household waste can be used to help warm the soil in your garden ready for planting and can help to protect early crops. Milk bottles, juice bottles and fizzy drinks bottles can all make fantastic cloches and can also be cut apart to provide collars that will protect vulnerable seedlings from rodents or slugs early in the season.

Ambitious Projects:

If you feel like being more ambitious then household rubbish can be used in all manner of ambitious garden projects. You could make a glass bottle wall or line a path, make a greenhouse from drinks bottles or inventively use rubbish to make the sides of a raised bed or a seating area. Use your imagination. There are plenty of ways your rubbish can come in handy in the garden.