So, let’s talk about a fun “reduce, re-use and recycle” project we finally got to this year!
Most of you joined us well after our trials and tribulations of getting our rain water catchment systems dialed in. For the 15 second recap, we originally started with commercial rain barrels. We discovered the parts on it weren’t really serviceable, fixable or designed for the long haul after we experienced an early, unexpected freeze-up. An event which basically destroyed the fittings on our original rain barrels. We ended up fashioning some really utilitarian barrels out of Rubbermaid trash cans as replacements, improving heavily on that serviceability aspect. We like them a lot and they’ve held up!
Well, we’ve held on to those old barrels over the years. They weren’t functional as rain barrels anymore, but it seemed like an awful lot of plastic and mass to just throw away!
Our desired project with them was to create some rather large planters, offering us a good place to establish another container based flower garden. Large planters are usually quite expensive to acquire, so they’re a serious a luxury item to have around. This seemed like a valuable project that at least partially re-couped our original investment into the barrels!
We love how our rain water planters turned out! The shape and style of our halved rain barrels turned out quite appealing. It’s really kind of fun to have a planter with a dysfunctional faucet, it just offers a really fun character to a planter.
We were able to make eight total planters out of our old, dysfunctional rain barrels. We may, or may not, use all of them. We filled a couple of them this year and we’ll see how things go. If they work out well for us, then we’ll probably convert the remainder and mix up a bunch more soil.
Strategically, what this offers us is a method of growing even more flowers! We completely ran out of our flower stocks this year, especially after planting just a couple of these containers. So this is incentive for us to grow even more of them next season! That’s kind of exciting that we have even more options in the future! Literally, thanks to trash!
Oh, and if you’re looking for a pro-tip on dealing with extremely large planters? One of the things you can do is fill up the bottom of the planter with (non-shiny) cardboard as a way to take up mass, kind of like container based hugelkultur. If you’re certain you won’t be using the container to grow food, you can even include things like Styrofoam to take up space in the planter. This can dramatically decrease your soil requirements to fill such a large container! Sure, eventually the soil will settle and compostable things will eventually compost. But, you’ll likely be adding back in things like compost to any large planters each year, which works to create an overall balance over time.
We aren’t crazy environmentalists or anything here. But, it certainly doesn’t hurt any time you can recycle something into a useful product that you’ll actually use!
