Make you own hanging basket liners

You can make an efficient, hanging basket liner, white or whatever color, that costs next to nothing.

This kind of hanging basket liner will keep your plants in place and moist and it, generally, comes for free, and will last for years, unlike the coir, moss, or even fake moss ones.

You can choose to make drainage holes or not, depending how well your plants may like having their “feet” in water. Considering, however, that generally, hanging baskets, when with bracket attached to wall of house, are in the so-called rain shadow, and thus do not get watered naturally by the rain having no drainage holes in the liner saves you watering on a daily basis.

There are many options for recycling plastic bags for use as handing basket liners. Compost bags of various sizes, as well as others, are suitable and the colors may vary from white, to blue or black. It all depends. On the other hand, other bags you can use might be transparent, which even allows you to see the growth of the roots and thus can see whether plants may get root bound. Spider plants (Chlorophytum comosum) is a candidate that gets root bound in pots or handing baskets quite quickly, which then meas either re-potting or splitting.

As the bags you may be using will not be designed to fit a hanging basket as a liner you will have to do some cutting and some folding and tucking, but it will be worth it alone for the fact that (1) you don't have to buy a liner every year and (2) you keep some plastic out of the waste stream (for some years at least). The important thing is that it works and well worth it. A win-win on so many levels.

© 2018

Plastic frozen food bags as hanging basket liner

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

I am one of those people who take reuse and all what is related to that to another dimension at times, as regular readers will know, and I do, yes, tend to keep those bags from frozen food.

Being a vegetarian, single, and not being able to shop for fresh vegetables daily or such, I tend to buy them frozen. Alas, they then come in those bags. But waste not want not they are, after being rinsed out, used for all manner of things, such as sandwich bags and, well, in this case to line hanging baskets.

While coir liners are compostable and all that they cost money and they don't always come in the shape of the particular hanging basket – or container that one is repurposing as a hanging basket – and I also often like to keep the plants in those baskets for longer than the lifespan of a coir liner.

Previously I have used cut up potting compost bags and such but none to hand when I wanted to do a hanging basket – this one, as you can see from the picture, however, is actually a wall mounted one – and remembered that I did have those frozen food bags.

Well, cut a long story short – and cutting was involved in the work as well – two bags later with the help of my trusty garden scissors the basket was lined and then filled with leaf mold. The latter no longer involved any plastic bags or cutting. The cost of the entire exercise? Aside from a little battery power for the drill to make the whole for the screw to hold the basket – zero. The basket was found, the screw and rawlplug, aka wall plug or screw anchor, too. Waste not want not obviously.

© 2017