Upcycle Glass Bottles To Make A Creative And Eco-Friendly Garden Bed

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A yard full of flourishing garden beds can elevate your landscaping and provide you with crops and produce all summer long. While you don't need edging to set your beds apart from the rest of your yard, creating a clear line between your garden and lawn has advantages. It looks beautiful and makes you less likely to damage plants with your mower or trimmer. Additionally, having a neat edge between your lawn and beds helps keep soil and mulch in the garden. You can use anything from rocks to purpose-made plastic edging, but one clever solution is to transform trash into garden treasure by using old glass bottles. Dig along the edge of your garden and place a row of clean, empty bottles upside down to create a unique border between your garden and grass. For gap-free garden edging, you'll need plenty of bottles and a square-point shovel for digging. 

Standard wine bottles or 1 liter sparkling water containers are likely the best option for this project, though you can certainly use 12 ounce bottles if you prefer. Before collecting your supplies, measure the length of your garden bed's edge to estimate how many bottles you'll need. Since the bottom of a 1 liter glass bottle generally has a diameter of around 3 ½ inches, you can expect to use almost four of them for each foot of edging. If you use smaller ones, of course, you'll need more. In addition to combing through your recycling bins, have your friends donate old empties. You can even thrift glass items for this project.

Use your shovel to dig a trench along the edge of your garden bed. You want it to be deep enough that only about ⅓ of each bottle will be visible above the soil surface. Decide at this point whether to orient the bottles so the bottoms are facing straight up or to bury them on a slight slant. If they are angled somewhat, this will prevent water from collecting in the divots on the undersides. However, you may prefer to let some moisture accumulate so that insects can use them as drinking stations, adding to the border's eco-friendliness.

Once you've placed all your bottles along the edge of your garden, use some of the soil you dug up to fill in the areas around them. Pack it firmly on both sides of the bottles to keep the edging stable, then check that they are evenly spaced and securely positioned. If the ground settles or rain loosens the soil, you may need to reposition them.

As simple as this project is, there are still many ways to make it your own. Instead of putting all the bottles at the same depth, consider staggering the heights to add visual interest. You could also accomplish this by using a range of different-sized bottles. There's nothing to stop you from using other types of glass jars and containers as well. While clear vessels or a range of colorful translucent glass is lovely, you could also paint them with a waterproof product like Nicpro stained glass paint. Keeping all your edging in black or gold would make for an elegant yard addition, while using a range of colors to create a rainbow pattern is a great way to add more joy to your landscape.