Smart Ways To Repurpose A Shoe Box For Your Garden And Plants

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Billions of pairs of shoes are put into production every year, with more unique variants hitting store shelves in the wake of an ever-growing "sneakerhead" subculture, and all of those shoes come with just as many shoe boxes. Commercial cardboard boxes have been mass-produced since the early 1800s, but became largely tied to shoe manufacturers in the following century.

The Environmental Protection Agency reported that paperboard containers and packaging (including shoe boxes) contributed nearly 42 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2018. Corrugated boxes are recycled at rates over 96%, but if you want to find ways to repurpose an old shoe box for yourself, they can be incredibly useful garden tools for seed storage, planting, and more.

Shoe boxes are, first and foremost, a great solution to holding excess goods. Small garden tools are often hung up on hooks to protect their blades, but it's mostly important to keep them in a moisture-free environment. You can accomplish the same thing by using a dehumidifier to help keep your tools rust-free, in which case they could be stored in a dry shoe box in your garden shed. A shoe box could also store organized packets of seeds like a sort of Rolodex. However, there's a lot more that can be done with shoe boxes out in the garden itself.

Newly grown seedlings can be transplanted from pots into your garden after they've sprouted for hardier, earlier blooms and harvests. If you use a biodegradable pot that lets roots come through the base and breaks down on its own, there's no need to remove the seedling from the pot in its entirety when planting. 

Rather than buying a set of Biodegradable Peat Pots on Amazon, you can creatively repurpose old shoe boxes to act as a planter. Newspaper and cardboard are good options for composting, especially if the cardboard wasn't used for foodstuffs like meat that may attract pests. A cardboard shoe box can be buried full of seedlings and break down in the soil. Even if it doesn't degrade that quickly, neither do common solutions like peat pots.

Other cardboard items like toilet paper and paper towel tubes have also been used as fast-degrading pots, but a shoe box could provide enough space to bury multiple seedlings side-by-side. In fact, if you want to try your hand at an extra arts and crafts project, you could add additional cardboard cylinders to fit inside your shoe box so your seedlings can have the appropriate spacing. Then, consider burying your shoe box seedlings in larger indoor pots or porch planter boxes to get a jump on growing a new houseplant rather than just filling out your garden.

A shoe box can easily be buried to supplement new plants in your garden, but you can also use the structure to prop up a small raised garden bed. If you have limited space or contaminated soil, a raised bed will typically be made from lumber and stone in an area with strong sunlight, around 8 to 12 inches high, so roots can grow. 

A shoe box full of soil and then buried in a pile of dirt can act as a makeshift raised bed for a small selection of plant life. It's often important to smother the existing grass or weeds with cardboard at the bottom of the bed, so using a shoe box can give you a head start without extra added steps.

Looking for more projects? Old shoe boxes can be used for all manner of household DIYs indoors. Keep your drawers organized with a shoe box DIY, or use the boxes as the stage for a school diorama. However, reserving the cardboard from your latest Nike purchase for gardening is the kind of recycling that helps you get a jump on healthier life habits and mental health benefits like reduced stress. Whether you're keeping the shoe box in your shed to organize tools or burying new seedlings out in the yard, it's a great way to begin fostering your green thumb.