We’ve had an email from Sandra:

We’ve replaced some old fashioned doors with glass in them. What can we do with them now?

I’ve got an eBay saved search which looks for cheap big used home/garden stuff in my local area – and there are always doors on there. Most don’t sell for a lot of money but at least they’ll be reused. There is, of course, Freecycle/Freegle too.

I’ve seen old doors – glazed or not – used creatively around gardens and allotments — properly weather-protected, they can be used as fencing and old panelled doors are a lot prettier than garden gates in a shabby chic/secret garden style. There is a path through some allotments near where we walk the dog sometimes; tall box hedging on each side but every now and then there is a fancy old door leading into a plot – very fun.

Depending on the extent/position of the glazing, it may be worth using them for other purposes in the garden too – for example, quite woody doors can be sliced in half lengthways to make planking for raised beds or the like, but doors including more, particularly clear, glass could be incorporated into a greenhouse or used to make a cold frame.

Any other ideas? Particularly any non-garden ideas? I think I’m a bit obsessed with gardens at the moment!

(Photo by clshearin)

We’ve had an email from Daniel:

Can I recycle roofing felt? I have a lot of small pieces to get rid of.

I’ve not heard of it being recyclable and looking into it, it seems unlikely because it’s several hard/impossible to recycle materials all squished together.

The better option would be to use it up somehow. Small pieces can be used for various roofing projects in the garden – for example, on top of rabbit hutches or the like*, or really small pieces could be used for the roof of a covered bird table.

As always, if you can’t use it up/reuse it in that way, try offering the pieces on your local Freecycle/Freegle group — someone nearby may make hutches or bird tables and be able to include it in their work.

Any other suggestions for using up small pieces of roofing felt? Daniel doesn’t say how small is small but I’m imagining roll-ends and off-cuts, so nothing more than a few feet wide.

* it’s not recommended to use roofing felt on anything to do with chicken coops because it provides a perfect breeding ground for red mites – but our coop came with it on the nest box part and it’s actually the least red mite-y area in the coop. I wouldn’t include it if I was building a coop from scratch though.

On the Suggest an Item page, Wendy recently explained:

We recently bought a new mattress after our Sleep Number bed (piece of junk, don’t get one) malfunctioned. We’ve saved the frame, which is made of black plastic and a lot of the cloth-like stuff that went around the air part. I was wondering if anyone had some nifty ideas for using this stuff. I am considering using the frame for raised beds or even a sand box.

If it’s how I’m imagining it, I’d make it into a raised bed — heck, I’d make just about anything into a raised bed at the moment. I get a bit obsessed about finding things I can grow stuff in at this time of year. If you already have enough bed space (you lucky duck!), it might be suitable to use as a frame for climbing plants – or if it’s light, you could cover it in clear plastic and make it into a giant cloche/row cover.

(Last time we asked about mattresses, someone posted a link to this radical recycling article – how to use every bit of an old spring mattress. It might be a bit too much for most people but I love the idea of a spring trellis.)

Any other suggestions? Any non-gardening ideas for people less obsessed than me? ;)

It might still be February but our 2011 growing season is already off and running here.

In addition to the eight fruit trees John planted a couple of weeks ago, I planted out eight fruit bushes at the weekend and I started my first batch of cauliflower, greenhouse tomatoes and lettuce the weekend before last. Following a recommendation from The Cottage Smallholder, I’ve bought a heated propagator to give my other greenhouse crops – cucumbers, chillis, pepper & tomatoes – a warm start in life — I’m hoping that arrives in the post today so I can get started with them ASAP.

For the first few sowings, I can remember what is where — the lettuce are in the troughs & square pots, the tomatoes in the round ones, the caulis in the fibre ones – but in a few weeks, I won’t be able to remember where everything is. And outside, we’ll want to know next year (and the year after, and the year after that) which fruit trees & bushes are which variety.

In the past, I’ve used slices of drinks cans or plastic milk bottles as plant markers – and they work reasonably well if you remember to write on them using a permanent marker (which I didn’t do last year – lots of confusion mid-year). I also know other people who use ice lolly sticks (but there has been an unacceptable dearth of those consumed here in the last year) and the like. And some people buy white sticks to use as labels – buy? buy?! not I! ;)

Do you reuse or recycle any packaging or bits of “waste” to label your plants or seedlings? Do you have any suggestions for making long term labels – ones that’ll be weather-resistant for at least a few years?

(Photo by normanack)

We’ve had another email from friend of Recycle This Petra:

From my sister in law I inherited a lot of yarn, mostly small balls of the same. I know you covered the item about the short ends of yarn and what to do with it. My question is a bit related.

A lot of the yarn is white or off-white. Not a colour I would choose for knitting a sweater for myself. And also for my kids, white is not a very
handy choice. Moreover, most of the yarn is synthetic, which I don’t really like to wear and makes it difficult to paint in a different colour.
So, my question is: What can I do with that white yarn? It is a box full of yarn (20 by 30 by 20 cm).

It’s not the right season to be thinking about it but my first thought was snowflake Christmas decorations (Mary Horesh recommended this crochet pattern on Twitter when she made them in December) – but if you used all of the yarn to make snowflakes, it would be more like a 10ft deep blizzard rather than a pretty delicate sprinkling of decorative snow ;)

Looking forward rather than back, I don’t wear white or choose to wear synthetics either but a lot of people do – and spring & summer are the months when a little white shrug or cardigan might be useful – perhaps keep some and pass the rest on to someone else via Freecycle/Freegle or Ravelry’s destash area.

Any other suggestions of patterns of things to make with it (ideally not clothes)? Or places to pass it on?

(Photo by missa88)