Nursery Pot Recycling

It's late spring, and gardens are underway everywhere during this prime planting time. For folks who buy plants at nurseries or garden stores, this tends to leave one with a flood of plastic pots of all shapes and sizes. (If your storage shed is anything like mine, you'd swear they reproduce as soon as the doors are shut...) So what do you do with your leftover pots?

I discovered that Tsugawa's Nursery in Woodland, WA, has a nifty solution to the problem of Pot Overpopulation. Right next to their parking lot, they have a large wooden bin for nursery pots of 1 gallon size or smaller. The little sign on the bin encourages folks to toss in their used, empty pots, or to take the pots they might need. Kinda like those little penny trays in convenience stores, only frankly more useful!

If you don't live near Tsugawa, you might check to see if your local nursery equivalent has a similar exchange program, or encourage them to set one up!

Other things you might do with your used pots:

* Save them and load them up with orphan plant babies all year long. Then organize an Orphan Plant Exchange in your local area through a listing such as Craigslist or Freecycle.

* Call up your local County Extension office and find the Master Gardener program. Some of these programs do plant sales as fund raisers, and often want the gallon or larger pots.

* Visit your local farmer's market and find out if any of the vendors there might want them. Some of the farmers run on a very thin profit margin, and might be glad for clean, useable nursery pots.

* Save them up, then post them on your local Freecycle group or on the Free section of your local Craigslist. Almost guaranteed someone will snap them up quickly. (Same goes for orphan plants...I never have trouble getting rid of mine!)