Re-purposing in the Garden

The jet ski pallets

Ok, so I am not generally a fan of buying new building materials.

With so many things out there in the world already, with a bit of imagination, you can often turn something someone else doesn't want into something you can use.

I am always happy to scan the freebie websites, grab something off the side of the road or take things friends and family are chucking out, and make them into things I can use.

I thought I'd post a few examples with pics of what I've used in the garden.

The first (and definitely the most difficult) were the garden beds. These started life as shipping containers for jet skis. A motorcycle & jet ski shop posted them on Gumtree for free and I immediately saw them as garden beds.

The trouble started when my husband & I went to collect them. Not only were they too big to fit in our large box trailer, they were so heavy (about 50kg) the two of us needed some help to get them on top of the trailer and strap them down.

I drove them home like this (about 130km) and then accepted the help of a neighbour with forks on the tractor to lift them off the trailer and get them into a paddock where I intended to use them. They sat there for a month and a half until I eventually decided I wanted to use them in the kitchen garden after all.

I managed to strip all the internal timber from one pallet using a handsaw, nearly doing my back a damage in the process, and then asked a friend with a chainsaw to do the other two (which she managed in about 10 minutes as opposed to my hour and a bit!).

We dragged the wretched things into the the kitchen garden, my husband and I knocked & unbolted the last bits of wood from the frames and dug them into place.

OMG, what a mission! I would have been better off just knocking together garden beds out of the timber laying around in the shed, but anyhoo, it's done now.

Garden beds in place, carpet used to kill weeds, old ladders used as climbing frames for plants.

And they DO make really great garden beds. I even used the bits of carpet off these pallets to lay on certain areas of the garden to kill the weeds.

But it's not always this tricky. I needed some arches/climbing frames for my climbing veggies, so I dragged two rotten old ladders out of the hayshed, dusted them off, used some wire and string to create a net of sorts and dug the legs into place.

Old ladders given a new life.

Hopefully, these will have zucchini and cucumbers growing up them in no time.

Some more simple examples are the used bricks my mother-in-law had lying around. These have made decorative edging for more garden beds and the border around the bean teepee (so far). 

And of course, eggshells should not be wasted whilst you have lettuce growing (or any other plants that attract slugs and snails). 

Save them up and, once they're dry, crush them finely and sprinkle them liberally around your plants. I asked a mini helper with tiny gumboots to stomp on them for me and was told it was fun :) 

And of course, why buy fancy tags/naming stakes for your veg when you have sticks, a stanley knife and a permanent marker on hand? 

Just shave off the end, write whatever type of seed you have planted on the white bit and stick it in the ground. Perfect.

Sometimes re-purposing turns out to be more trouble than it's worth, but not very often. It's a great way to use what you have, save stuff from going into landfill, save cash and engage your creativity, all at once.