Recycle to make your own plant support

Here's a great bit of recycling! I've turned an old pop up basket into a simple way of keeping plants upright and looking good, and it only took ten minutes!

Have you got one of those pop up baskets, made from a piece of plastic sheet or fabric with a spiral shaped wire inside? 

They are sold as pop up garden tidies, or indoor versions, that squash flat when not being used but expand to form a sort of bucket for collecting prunings as you go round the garden. In my case, the indoor version usually holds loads of soft toys belonging to the kids. They can also be used as a laundry basket.

Eventually they tend to disintegrate and you're left with a useless piece of wire, but it's always good to reuse and recycle rather than throw everything away, so I've turned one into a plant support.  

How to turn an old collapsible basket into a plant support:

First I removed the outside. Some are made of fabric, others from plastic. I cut it to be able to pull out the metal wire that gives it its shape.

I stood on the wire to flatten it, as it had a tendency otherwise to become like a giant spring.

I put a cork onto the top end, to prevent it hurting anyone.  

Then I wound it around and through my black bamboo (Phyllostachys nigra) which had been tending  to flop over rather a lot and obscure the pathway alongside. 

The wire helps it stay upright, but the way the individual leaves and smaller side stems poke through between the coils of wire means it remains fairly discrete to look at. The focus of one's view remains the bamboo and not the wire.

And it's always good to create something useful from something that would otherwise have been thrown away!

Happy growing, and recycling.

Paul

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