We’ve had an email from Cathy:

Please give me ideas about how to recycle a bird cage. I don’t have childen though I think it could be used to store stuffed animals? Now it is holding old video tapes. Thank you for your help.

I saw a pretty ornate one going cheap (unintentional bird pun, sorry) in a charity shop last year and was tempted to buy it to use as a “hanging basket” type thing for my growing collection of spider plants. I thought it would look nice in our turquoise bathroom – the white of the cage, the green of the plant and the plantlet shoots hanging down. I didn’t buy it in the end but I still think it would have been cute.

If it had been a bigger, less ornate one, I might have been tempted to buy it for the garden for, say, sweet peas or beans or the like. A clear plastic sheet over it would make an impromptu greenhouse to start with and when the plants had got big enough, take that off then the plants can use the wire sides for support as grow.

Any other ideas?

(Photo by bradimarte)