Creative Ideas for your Veg Garden – Diary of a Rocket Gardener

With so many wine bottles in the recycling each fortnight, from myself and my neighbours, I decided to start collecting them and using them to build raised beds. I’ve found it works really well – have had some wine bottle beds in place for almost ten years now, and have never had a broken bottle situation. Sometimes they get a bit wonky, but they are easily straightened out again.

During the first couple of years, I used various different things as plant markers (I don’t really use anything at all now as I’m pretty familiar with all the different plants and can usually recognise what’s what from day one onwards.)

1 – Pebbles – It’s really easy to paint plant names onto big pebbles and pop them at the end of rows.One downside can be that slugs hide underneath them though, so beware!
2 – Wine Bottle Corks – I just prodded these onto bamboo skewers, wrote on them with permanent marker and pushed them into the ground. Easy.
3 – Old Wooden Spoons – I used these a few times and it worked well. Again, I just wrote on them with permanent marker.
4 – Bits of Old Slate – This worked wonders after my neighbours had their roof re-done – I just nabbed bits of tiling from their skip and painted the plant names on.

This was a mission of a job, but if you’re any good at building stuff, then I’d say it is well worth it. I got the window frames from my parents who had, for some bizarre reason, had several being stored in an old garage forever and a day. They came in handy though! I’ve had 2 iterations of my window frame greenhouse now, and both lasted around 4 or 5 years.

I love finding things to use as planters, like this little row boat that a friend was getting rid of because it had so many holes that it wasn’t worth repairing. I’ve also used an old wheelbarrow, an old coal scuttle and stacks of tyres.

I think this is one of my favourite things in my garden, having lots of different places where I grow herbs, especially sage, rosemary and lavender for year round growth. What I love most is the colour that they bring in the warmer months, and all the bees and butterflies that they attract.

Bamboo is so useful in the garden – I use it for bean supports, tomatoes, for propping up mesh netting and all sorts. One year I built a bamboo trellis fence to keep the chickens out of the veg garden. It looked so great! Unfortunately it only survived two seasons, but I have since made trellises to line the back of raised beds for vertical growing, in the full knowledge that it’ll only last a year or two.