Recycle in the Garden: How to use recycled materials

In today’s post we will see how to recycle: Old wooden benches, Old ropes or strips made with plastic bags, Sticks, pipes, metal bars, Pumpkins and Old clothes.

Recycling examples in previous articles

In the first entry on how to recycle in the garden (Recycled materials in the urban garden), we saw several ideas to reuse different types of objects in the organic garden: a plastic drum, pallets, yogurt or egg containers, a washing machine and fruit boxes.

Wooden pallets, plastic drums that can be used to make a flower pot or a vertical garden, different types of containers or even… a recycled washing machine ! We have been seeing all these things in different orchards around the world that we have talked about in Agrohuerto.

Recycle in the organic garden

One of the advantages of recycling in the garden is that there are things that you no longer need to buy, since we manufacture them ourselves. Or well… more than we manufacture, we get them and reuse them.

But it is not just about saving money by making our garden with recycled materials: recycling is one of the most important aspects of an ecological and sustainable garden.

In addition to recycling materials and objects in the garden like the ones we see in this and in the previous post, we can reuse natural elements: water, crop residues, dry leaves, stones…

Well, by collecting and reusing rainwater, for example.

Composting is also a technique based on the use of residues and waste. With these materials we can make compost, one of the best fertilizers and fortifiers for the organic garden.

Another thing that comes to mind that we can recycle in the garden is by making padding or mulching by reusing tree bark, cut grass, stones…

Well, I have already given you some examples of recycling other types of “things” in the garden… Now we continue with the recycling of materials:

Wooden tablets

In the therapeutic garden of the Carabanchel Alto Health Center they had a carpenter by profession and several handymen on the team. When the City Council donated the old benches that they had replaced, the gardeners of this urban garden created terraces using nails and hammer blows.

String or strips of plastic bags

Also in the orchard of the health center we saw this trellis mesh that they had made by intertwining ropes and attaching them to wooden frames.

The other day I saw this idea to reuse plastic bags.

It occurs to me that for this type of trellis the system of joining strips of plastic bags could be perfectly valid instead of ropes. If you have small children, they may be entertained and amused by the idea of ​​building something like this from plastic bags:

Wooden sticks and metal bars

In the orchards of Navarrevisca they use almost everything to make the stakes or recycled stakes: sticks, ropes, remains of construction materials such as corrugated steel bars, hollow profiles…

You can also use pipes, like the ones in the compost screening structure that we saw yesterday in the first part of the post. Anything long and sturdy can be reused or recycled in the garden to make trellises. They will be easy to get in junkyards, remains of works, blacksmiths…

pumpkins

In Antonio’s orchard, also in Navarrevisca, we saw these birdhouses made with pumpkins and others with wooden slats.

Birds, although they can be a danger to some fruits in the orchard, can be our allies in the fight against insect pests, since they feed on many of them. Besides, the song of the birds in the orchard is always beautiful, isn’t it? If we have something like this we can solve the problem of birds pecking by putting a mesh on strawberries, blackberries…

Old clothes

I couldn’t say goodbye without letting you see these scarecrows made with broken dolls, old clothes, mop sticks, etc. THEY ARE TOTAL!!!!

The caretaker of my building, here in Madrid, made them for the urbanization garden but… they decided it was better to go to the mountains, to Navarrevisca, where they are much happier taking care of my parents’ tomatoes!

I hope you liked my collection of ideas to recycle in the garden. Have you come up with more? Do you use recycled materials in the orchard or garden? You can share it in the comments or upload a photo about recycling in the garden

Finally, tell you that, in addition to recycling in the garden, we can use other tricks to get a cheap urban garden (here I leave the link in case you are interested in this topic).