Use Dollar Tree Laundry Baskets As A Budget-Friendly Way To Protect Your Garden

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When you keep a garden, one of the chief issues you need to concern yourself with is the destruction of your garden. There are the usual suspects: kitties that use the soil as their toilet, hungry deer stopping by for supper, and the dreaded hailstorm that stomps your tomato plants to bits. As it turns out, there is a solution that works for them all — round Dollar Tree laundry baskets — though it's worth talking about the issue of hail specifically. 

Ice balls from heaven bring extra challenges with them, like hefty winds and stripped plants. And if a plant is stripped of at least 50% of its leaves, it will have less ability to pull nutrients and water from the soil. If you turn the laundry basket over and place it over your plants, it becomes the protective cover your plants need. It just needs to be held down by some stakes, such as these UPMCT galvanized garden staples, in case the winds get strong enough to blow the basket away.

Dollar Tree laundry baskets mitigate both of the two big issues with hailstorms. Although the laundry baskets have holes on the bottom, the holes are small, and most hail stones can't get through them. The stones that do will likely get slowed down significantly by this garden row cover. Some systems use chicken wire for this purpose, and the holes in chicken wire are at least as big as those in the laundry basket. Secondly, the holes on the sides are a benefit if the winds come whipping through. Wind will pass through the holes easily, leaving the system intact.

Your Dollar Tree laundry basket doesn't just organize your laundry room. At $1.25 per item, they're a cheap way to cover your plants when a hailstorm strikes. Other, similar types of plant coverings cost anywhere from about $8 apiece for a small garden cloche to about $37 for just a section of a larger cloche. In the latter case, there is also some assembly required because the piece in question is just that — a piece of a larger caging system that needs to be put together.

Here's something else worth considering from a cost perspective. The hard truth for novice gardeners is that more-expensive systems cost more to scale up. If you're just starting out or are gardening on an extreme budget, it's easier to justify the cost of a Dollar Tree laundry basket than it is other kinds of garden covers. It's also easier to bring in a basket or two as needed, which will cost you less than $5, than it is to add more of the other types of garden cloches, or more importantly, than it is to build one.

Finally, there's going to be time savings, too. For example, some of the more elaborate home garden systems are made of a frame and a chicken wire top. It takes several hours of effort to build the system. On the other hand, it takes only a couple of minutes to cover your plants with the laundry basket and then push a few garden staples into the ground to keep it in place.