If you love gardening but live in a small home or apartment, use an IKEA Variera plastic bag dispenser as a planter to take advantage of vertical space and grow a tiny garden.
With this DIY planter hack, you can use your balcony or patio to vertically grow plants with shallow roots, like cucumbers, strawberries, lettuce, thyme, oregano, or azaleas.
An IKEA plastic bag dispenser makes a convenient, low-cost planter because it’s tall and thin. It fits in anywhere and can be hung on a fence, railing, or wall to save space.
The bag dispenser is a cylinder with holes for holding plastic bags, which are also perfect for plants to grow through, and it can be opened, filled with soil, and closed again.
To start your vertical garden, you'll need an IKEA plastic bag dispenser, soil, seedlings or seeds, and a layer of moss to prevent the soil from falling out through the holes.
Open the bag dispenser, lay it flat, and cover it with a layer of moss with the green side facing the holes. Add a layer of soil on top of the moss and roll the cylinder closed.
Poke holes in the moss and plant your seeds or seedlings through the dispenser’s holes. When it’s completely planted, hang the dispenser on your balcony and water it thoroughly.