Making Your Own Home Garden Containers From Plastic Bottles

Step 4 Planting in, Using, and Enjoying Your Garden Containers!

As you can see from the array on top of our puppy kennel, any plastic container will work great. Big Gulp cups, coffee cans, soda bottles, etc. Even the little half liter bottles work great for seed starters that make for easy transplanting. Just make sure they're plastic, not metal. Metal tends to rust and can affect the plants faster than you'd expect.

The seed bed you can see in that background is the cheap type you buy from Wal-Mart. I had a couple of those that were given to me by someone who wasn't going to use them. The plastic is very cheap, flimsy, and breaks easily. Not recommended unless you need catcher trays for drainage.

Which brings me to the last point: catch pans. You'll need bottoms for these containers to drain into so the water doesn't just sieve right through or end up on your floor. The coffee cans have lids that work perfect for this. We used the trays you can see in the background from the seed starters as well as old cookie tins. Unused lids from Tupperware, Rubbermaid tubs, and a lot of other things can be recruited for this as well. I even used an old oil pan (thoroughly cleaned) once.

This is a great, low cost, and easy way to get your garden going from seed. Plus, it's a great Saturday project on the porch for the whole family to get involved in.