Spray Painting the Town: Upcycled Patio Planters

Spray paint might be one of my favorite tools for affordably breathing new life into old furniture and household items.  I have used it to restyle many a basket, wreath, vase, and dresser or end table into something new and fabulous.  It's easy to use and cheap, it looks great on so many surfaces, and you can do so much with it.  Infact, just this week, I watched my neighbor spray painting the white metal awnings of his all-white house to a deep green.  It instantly added so much charm.  I probably won't be painting my awnings any time soon, but I do appreciate his creativity.

These two plastic planters that held large store bought mums last fall recently received a makeover to turn them into cheerful spring planters for my patio.  With some left over paint from a previous project and a few minutes I took these pots from trash pile to re-styled.

These plastic pots have been washed and are drying in the afternoon sun awaiting their makeover

First wash out your pot, making sure to get any dirt or stickers may have been attached. Some people suggest washing pots that previously held plants with bleach so that you start with a sterile surface when planting new needs or plants.  I washed these pots and placed them on the patio in the afternoon sun to dry.

When your clean pots are dry set them on a level surface away from anything that could be damaged by paint.  I always try to do my spray painting projects outside.  There is the spot where they dogs have flattened the grass, so I don’t might if it gets a little paint on it.  You can also lay out a tarp or newspaper to protect the ground before you start painting. The best time to spray paint is when there is just a slight breeze.  If it is too windy, dust or leaves may blow on your wet paint, and you may lose a lot of your paint coming out of the can.  But a slight breeze can help ventilate the area.

I set my pots upside down and spray the outside first. Don’t spray the bottom, unless you are willing to wait a while to ensure it is dry before flipping the pot over.  Spray your pots with small even circular motions so being careful to not get to much paint on any one spot, or it will drip, and to ensure an even coat.  You may need to do two coats depending on your paint.  Once it looks even, let it dry.

Turn the pot over, and apply a coat of paint to the inside, focusing mostly on the top half of the pot. Remember, you are going to fill this with dirt, so you really don’t need to paint it all the way to the bottom, but you can if you want to.  I usually focus my paint on the areas that will be visible.

While one pot dries you and paint the other, and about the time you finish the second the first will be dry

Again, let the planters dry.  One of the nice things about spray paint is that it dries really fast, so this whole project including waiting for the pots to dry three times takes me less than an hour.

I usually let them fully air out for a few days before I plant anything in my pots. 

Can't wait to plant! These pots already brighten up my patio.

For this project I used Rust-Oleum Painter's Touch Ultra Cover spray paint in Brilliant Blue (Gloss finish) and Eden (Satin finish) I like it because it covers evenly in about one coat and with one can of paint I have been able to cover about three pots and one large wicker basket.  Because it sprays two coats at once, it works great for projects where you want solid color blocks.  For projects where you want to blend colors, I have had a lot of success with Krylon Indoor/Outdoor.

Are you excited and about to take a boring pot and make it awesome?!  I want to hear about it.

What items do you have in your house or garage that could be given a new life through a simple coat of paint?

Seed Starting Greenhouse from Recycled Materials

I have many garden lusts on Pinterest.  (So many projects, so much easier to just drool over them on the internet.)  However, I try to be intentional about turning my Pinterest inspirations into reality, be it attempting DIY crafts, incredible looking recipes, or great recycling projects like this one, a mini greenhouse for starting seeds made from empty toilet paper rolls and plastic containers.  

 I loved this project because it was free to make, it used items I actually have in my house (toilet paper rolls, and plastic salad bins), and it accomplished a project I had intended to do anyway, start some tomato seedlings.

Depending on your household and how many seeds you want to start you might have all the supplies on hand immediately to start this project, or you might need a few days (or weeks – those who do not use much toilet paper) to save them up.

What you need:  you can visit the link for a complete tutorial.

1.       Empty toilet paper rolls, for each of my salad bin I needed 6 rolls, cut in half (the toilet paper rolls decompose in your garden so bonus!)

2.       Plastic bin like those from organic salad and spinach. I also made one from a rotisserie chicken and one from a cinnamon roll container. (So don't think you have to be all super organic or healthy to do this project.)

3.       Potting soil: I just bought some organic potting soil

4.       Seeds: Your choice

5.       Scooping utensil for transferring dirt and water

I ended up planting four containers.  Two full containers I planted with some heirloom tomato seeds I saved from last summer. I planted a total of 24 starter pots full of tomatoes.  Most of these sprouted so I will definitely have plants to share with friends in a few weeks (bonus!).  In the other two containers I planted 6 pots each of chili de agua, zucchini, oka, and tomatillo.  The chili pepper seeds I had saved from last year’s the garden and the zucchini, okra, and tomatillo seeds I had bought last year but didn’t plant.  So, in this entire project the only thing I actually bought was the organic potting soil, which was on sale, and for me, a worthwhile investment in my gardening adventures this year. 

For me, the direct costs for this project were less than $7. If I had bought each of my 52 plants for around $2.50 each I would have spent $130 (not including tax).  If I had bought a similar seed starting greenhouse kit like this one at Burpee.

I would have bought the 72 cell planter for the cost savings and spent $14. So, even looking at it from this angle, I still saved 50% of my costs by recycling products I would have otherwise thrown away.  Recycling options in my city are not very convenient and they only accept a pretty limited amount of items, so if not for this project I would have tossed the four bins and 26 cardboard toilet paper rolls. And isn’t that the heart of recycling, creatively accomplishing what we want to do with the resources we already have?

Garden Goal: Save More Seeds

My whole initial gardening desire was born out of a heart connection to my grandmother. As long as I knew my grandma she had a garden, and it was not uncommon to find seeds from all kinds of fruits and vegetables wrapped in paper towels or towed in jars all over.  In fact it was one of the little comical quirks she had that made her so lovely.  She passed away in the spring of 2007 and as a way to honor her I wanted to cultivate her garden.  In a way, her garden itself is a family heirloom.

But, I will just be really honest with you, I am a bad gardener.  Really bad.  Like I am only successful if I grow plants that flourish when neglected kind of bad.  When anything I plant grows at all I am pretty ecstatic and don’t get too upset when things don’t work out because I, say, forgot to water them for three weeks during 115 degree summer.  I really love the idea of gardening, but the actual work of weeding and remembering to water and all of that cultivation stuff is hard for me.  But for a wide and ever evolving set of reasons, I continue to go at it. I have had a lot of failures, and it is a blessing that in spite of whatever hopes I have to one day be able to grow all my own food, I have not had to rely on my own garden to sustain me.  My grandmother’s generation pioneered the victory garden, and I have pioneered the failure garden.

I first really became interested in heirloom plants after that first gardening year without my grandmother when I planted and fell in love with a pepper and a tomato.  Love at first bite. The pepper, chili de agua, had an intensity somewhere between a poblano and a jalepeno, and the black cherry tomato, a sweet, dark, mellow fruit that I searched for at farmer’s market stands for years after.  Maybe it was the fact that this chili was absolutely perfect filleted on a summer burger, or that this tomato was different than the standard red cherry tomato you can buy in the store that caused me to want to seek out these particular varieties.  After a couple years of searching, I finally discovered the heirloom tomato farm from which I had originally encountered these plants at a garden fair and planted almost my entire garden full of tomatoes, peppers, and some herbs.  I would have been swimming in salsa if it had not been the hottest driest summer in Oklahoma in decades.

This year I really wanted to save seeds and ensure I never was without my beloved chili pepper and tomato plants so I began to research heirlooms.  The more I learned, the more I felt like it was something I wanted to support beyond just my tomato obsession. It is true; you can’t walk into a grocery store and find these particular varieties of vegetable and fruit.  In fact, where I live, the selection of produce is so ordinary that trying to eat healthy can get really boring.  There is something in my spirit that says, it is good to grow these plants because they are different.  It is important to grow these plants because that means that they will continue to be enjoyed. And so, soap boxes about our nation’s food systems aside, I just want to continue to enjoy these plants, and that has led me to where I am today, learning about heirloom seed saving.

According to seedsave.org, vegetables that produce seed the same season as planted and are mostly self-pollinating are the ideal varieties for beginner seed saving gardeners to try.  Beans, lettuce, peas, peppers, and tomatoes are all excellent types to try if you are just starting out.  I actually happen to be trying to grow all of these veggies this year. YAY!

I took my Cowboy and we went to the store looking for heirloom seeds and much to my dismay no packages said “we are heirlooms”.  My sweet supportive Cowboy helped me pour over seed racks in a variety of stores checking the backs of packages and trying to figure out which of these seeds would satisfy me. Talk about an obstacle, all I wanted to do was grow some heirlooms and I couldn’t even find the dang seeds. After driving all over town, and feeling quite discouraged, I consulted the internet for some knowledge (which if I had done in the first place would have saved me a lot of trouble, I know, but that is not how impulsive go-getters do their gettin’).

I discovered several key facts:

• If it does not say “FI Hybrid” it’s open pollinated.
• ALL Heirlooms are open pollinated. Not all open pollinated seeds are Heirlooms.

Ok, that cleared up a LOT of questions in my mind when I was standing in the seed aisle of Home Depot, but regardless of the Hybrid versus Open Pollinated seeds; I still had a big question of how to acquire open pollinated heirloom seeds.  Oh thank Internet for being oh-so-made for these types of dilemmas.

And very importantly, I also confirmed that the seeds that I thought were heirlooms that I got from Seed Savers Exchange at Whole Foods ARE heirlooms! seedsavers.org This was the best news of all, since I already had some of these seeds, and I could easily get more.

In this process I also learned that for my small backyard garden, heirloom tomato seed saving might not be practical since I intend to plant several varieties of plants in a small space.  The seeds I “save” and am growing this year I actually saved from some tomatoes I bought at Whole Foods on sale to eat because the drought last summer was so rough on my tomato crop that I barely got any fruit.  However, I did come across a great resource, seedsave.org  which had a ton of practical and well organized information and instructions for saving the seeds of different types of vegetables. Book marked!  A book that I came across during my research called Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth is going to go on my wish list so that I can really educate myself on this stuff.  Seed saving has been like most things in my life where I just follow my gut first and then learn for to actually do it later.

After all this internet reading, my conclusion is that if I want to do this, I need to focus on choosing heirloom seeds to grow, collecting heirloom seeds for the future from reputable sources, and when I am only growing one variety of a plant that won’t cross pollinate, then saving the seeds.  So this unfortunately rules out saving my tomato seeds (and tomatillos because they are similar to tomatoes), because I intend to grow several varieties.  However, I am planning on a couple of other plants for which I will only plant one type and for those I can save the seeds. 

Plants with seeds I want to save:

• Pepper, chili de agua
• Pepper, green bell (I am growing this on the other side of the yard, so I think it will be ok)
• Peas
• Beans (apparently beans are super difficult to cross pollinate because of the way the flower is formed, I did not know!)
• Squash
• Okra
• Nasturtium
• Marigold
• Garlic (garlic grows basically wild in my garden, thanks to my awesome grandmother, so I put it on this list but it does not require much work from me)

My bench mark for success in this goal will be met if I save even just a handful more seeds this year, plant them next spring, and I start to educate myself about the science of seed saving and cultivation of heirloom plants.  Seriously, success will taste like putting that first chili pepper on my burger this summer and thinking about how it came from a seed from a pepper I grew last year. I might even do the awesome dance.