As long term gardeners, one of our necessary focuses is on sustainability of our equipment. Whether your driving factors are environmentally focused or economic and saving money, it’s an area most of us can agree upon.
Plant labels are one such area where we make this decision. We’ve been re-using plant labels for decades. Our OG “thousand packs” of plants labels still serve our needs in 2026, just as they did in 2016. And 2006 before that.
Our plant labels of choice are 6 inch, plain white labels. We snap these in half to make three inch labels, allowing that original purchase to go twice as far. We make an effort to collect and store them every year, with the goal of refurbishing them for the next season.
To clean them up, we just soak them in bleach for about 24 to 48 hours. We try to mix them up a few times, to get a good thorough cleaning. This gets any permanent marker off of them and will also often “whiten” them, since they fulfill a rather dirty job. After a good, thorough rinse, the labels are good as new.
Typically, this is a project we share with you in the deep winter months. For a few reasons, we just didn’t get to it. But, that doesn’t excuse us from the fact we’ll soon be needing a vast supply of freshly refurbished plant labels!
We’re now ready to label our plants and keep track of what we’re doing! We know the “human condition” well enough that this is the difference from getting cauliflower where we’d intended to get a cabbage!
