Don't Toss That Old Nursery Pot: The Clever Way You Could Be Using It In The Garden

For gardeners, good weather and a bountiful harvest may be uncertain, but one thing is a given — that ever-growing collection of old plastic nursery pots in the corner of your shed. Whether you've brought home pots of tomatoes or herbs from a local garden nursery or an assortment of trees and shrubs from a big box store, these plants were most likely transported to your yard in plastic containers of various sizes. If you're creative and thrifty, you can give reuse them to give them a second life. In fact, nursery pots are particularly well-suited to acting as stand-ins for buckets that you'll find helpful in your garden.

It seems like a shame to throw these containers out when they can be easily reused. Plus, if you were to look into buying a large plastic nursery pot, you'd be surprised at the price. A 5-gallon container used to grow trees and shrubs can cost you $20 when purchased in a retail setting. Once you realize how much these containers are worth, you may feel even more inclined to find creative ways to reuse plastic nursery pots in your garden, and if you don't already have a dedicated garden bucket, these will do that job brilliantly.

You may have already discovered how convenient it is to use large plastic nursery pots as weed buckets in your garden. If you forget to haul the contents to the compost heap, the drainage holes in the bottom will prevent water from pooling in the bottom, making this an improvement on a traditional pail. These containers are also perfect to reuse as buckets for hauling harvested crops from your garden. Medium sized pots are perfect for holding tools such as snips, hori horis, and garden gloves. You can reserve smaller nursery pots for upcycling into a clever dispenser for keeping your garden twine tangle free.

Of course, where these containers fall short in comparison to buckets is that they don't have handles. But if you're handy, you can easily fashion one out of a length of rope so that you can reuse the container even more easily in the garden. Once you've repurposed as many of these containers in your collection as possible around your garden, don't send them to the landfill — one of the easiest ways to recycle your plastic nursery pots is by returning them to the nursery center or big box store where you purchased your plants.