Makeshift Gardens
Recently, my partner and I decided to get into home horticulture and raising plant babies (I love restating things I just said but in different phrasing!). It all started with a few succulents, since my wife is obsessed with them. But as the food we ate shifted to a primarily plant-based diet, we wanted to start growing our own herbs and even some vegetables.
Living in an apartment makes this harder than owning our own home with property to have a garden on. However, we’re lucky to have a back deck with our apartment, meaning we can place potted plants out back for full sunlight exposure when needed.
As we took in more and more plants, we realized we would need a system to keep like plants together and dissimilar species in different parts of the apartment. Some of our succulents and our bonsai tree stay inside during colder times, whereas herbs are primarily in our kitchen window. Nonetheless, we wanted a systematic way to keep things together so that they could all be in one place and look like a collective whole rather than lone plants sitting by themselves away from other plants. Luckily, we had a stash of shipping supplies that were unused for a few years, and we found these supplies to be the perfect way to tie together (quite literally) our plant collection.
Here’s what we did.
Twine
Twine works quite well in keeping certain plants upright. We have one succulent that’s rather tall and thin, so it tends to lean heavily to one side. We countered this by tying some twine to the bottom of the stalk and anchoring it to something on its opposite side to pull it back some. Hopefully it continues to grow straight from here on.
Packing tape
Packing tape is one of my favorite shipping supplies because of how versatile and strong it is. We used tape to bind our multitude of cardboard boxes while also “taping” our pots to those upturned boxes (more on that in a second). This allowed us to feel safe about some lighter herbs from being knocked over by wind when outside or by an errant arm while inside.
Cardboard boxes
We use these as little “stands” by turning the boxes upside down and placing different pots on different tiers. This gave a rough hewn look to our little collection of plants, because the cardboard doesn’t look fancy but rather “rushed” and put together in an instant. This made our little garden a lot more familiar and commonplace, a look we wanted to accomplish.