Saturday, July 28, 2012

Frugal Fridays


Frugal Fridays

I am declaring Friday's to be Frugal Friday's from here on out.   Everyone is cutting back and looking for ways to make a dollar go further it seems, me included.   

If you have a good frugal tip please share it.  We can all use the help.  Or if there is something you feel your spending too much money on and think others are managing to do less expensively ask.  If your wondering about it someone else probably is too.   

Turning plastic food containers into garden pots


Although technically it's Sat., I haven't been to bed yet so it's late late Friday night in my world and this here will be the first Frugal Friday post.  

I have always got tons of plastic containers from sour cream or yogurt etc. around and I save them to freeze things in but still they add up.   I hate tossing them.  Plastic will be in our land fills forever and it just feels wrong to use them once and add to the growing mass of garbage in the world.  

I decided to use the extra ones I have on hand as plant pots in the spring rather than to buy peat pots.  Although they would be fine to use as is after being washed out, I wanted to dress them up just a bit so they were prettier to look at when I'm watering them.    

These are so easy to do.  First I cut the very top off with regular scissors.  Then I took a pair of my decorative scrapbooking scissors and cut again right next to the first cut,  to leave a pretty edge on them.  Michael's or any place that sells craft supplies sells these scissors for a couple of dollars in a variety of pretty patterns.  

Next I put a couple of coats of primer on them to they would hold a colored paint without it peeling right off.   When that was dry I used a cheap acrylic craft paint.  It took a couple of coats but I went from white to a medium brown.   Any color you like will do.  I'm messy when I pot things so I wanted them close to the color of the soil.   A terra cotta color might have been pretty too.



Then I punched 4 or 5 small holes in the bottom of each one and that was it.  I used a hole punch and hammer on a small craft mat to do that. 

  When they were really dry (24 hours later)  I took my fingernails and tried to scrape the paint off but it didn't come off like it would had I not used a primer first.   I didn't paint the bottoms so that if they sat in a wet spot for any length of time they wouldn't start to peel.   

Since I am always running short on pots in the spring when the seedlings need to get out of packs but it's too soon to put them in the ground these will help bridge the gap.


Elizabeth

2 comments:

  1. I think this is a good re-use of platic pots, and yes, they are bothersome... we like the sour cream, but don't like the packaging... but to be truly frugal, should you have painted them?

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  2. Mary Ann, your right....to be truly frugal they probably should have been left as is, no paint. For me though if I can do something cheap and re-use, repurpose something and have it look nice too I have the best of both worlds. The amount of paint and primer used is pretty small and when frugal can be attractive too, why not? I think a lot of people give up on re-use , repurpose because they don't know how to do it and have it look nice too. And for those that feel it's not necessary to have them look better, they can just pop those holes in the bottom and be done with it. Myself, I would eventually quit using them if I couldn't figure out a way to make them look somewhat better.

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