There are plenty of things around the house that you can use for your upcycled garden. Upcycling reduces waste and makes your garden more lovely. From reusing food packaging to start your seedlings to decorating your fence or repurposing household items as planters, here are some great ideas to give used items a second life in the garden.

1) Reuse Food Packaging to Start Seedlings

You don’t need to buy seed starting cells or pots. You can use food packaging. Instead of throwing away your yogurt containers, rinse out the little plastic cups and fill them up with soil to start seeds. Lots of packaging items can be reused in this way. An egg carton can easily be repurposed as a tray of 12 seed starting cells. Egg shells work great as they retain moisture when wet. Washed-out tin cans can be used as retro-style planters for annual flowers. The roll of cardboard in the middle of the toilet paper can also be used as a seed starting pot – with the added bonus that you can go ahead and bury the whole thing when you’re planting. This will reduce the risk of transplant shock.

Source: Get Cracking

2) Upcycled garden, Furniture Displays

There are lots of ways you can recycle furniture into eye-catching plant displays. For example, paint a chest of drawers with exterior paint inside and out. Use the drawers to display potted plants. The drawers will last longer if you use potted plants, and you’ll be able to swap out the plants as the season changes so they’re always flowering.

Source: Happy Together By Jess

Want an herb garden in a limited space? Grab a small table with an apron, take the legs off, flip the top upside down so the apron forms a space to hold soil, and then reattach the legs. You can sand and paint with exterior paint before filling the top with soil and planting your herbs.

3) Decorate Your Fence

A fence doesn’t have to be boring. Decorate a wooden privacy fence by hanging a few flower pots on it, then putting an old picture frame around the potted plant – this way you can get a cohesive and cute look with only a few potted plants, and you can find a use for those old picture frames that nobody uses anymore.

You can hang old mason jars from your garden fencing and put tea candles in them to provide mood lighting at night. Hang an old window from your wooden fence and frame it with a pair of mason jars filled with fresh flowers from BloomsyBox.

Don’t have a fence? You can combine all kinds of upcycled elements with garden fencing materials to create a unique wall of your very own. Take, for example, this wine bottle fence. Are you not feeling that creative? You can use old doors and old windows as fence panels, too.

Source: Good Home Design

4) Install an Upcycled Garden Path

If you’ve recently had decking laid, you can reuse the offcuts to lay an upcycled garden path atop a bed of white gravel. Or you can use scrap wood from your garage to lay a garden path. Got some old bricks you need to get rid of? Reclaimed bricks can make a beautiful garden path, and if you don’t have any used bricks lying around, you can probably buy them online or from one of your neighbors.

Source: Organized Clutter

5) Repurpose Household Items as Planters

Pots for plants sure are expensive, aren’t they? Especially if you want to buy decorative ones. But you don’t need to spend money on planters. You can repurpose any number of objects around the house. These cork planters are one of our favorite ideas!

Do you have an old metal colander you don’t use anymore? Add some pieces of chain and a hook and you can put it to work as a hanging basket for a plant on your deck or back porch. You can use an old fish kettle as an attractive planter for your front porch – in fact, any old pot or pan can be repurposed as a planter!

There are so many things you can repurpose and reuse in your upcycled garden. Just make sure to give any wooden items a nice coat of exterior paint to preserve them as long as possible, and enjoy your garden upcycling adventures.

Source: My Frugal Adventures