Plastic bottle pots and planters by Sadie C

My project was to make pots out of old plastic bottles that also created more planting spaces for people who don’t have much space for gardening. My inspiration for the project stemmed from a planter I saw at the Wellington Botanical Garden that was made from old plastic milk jugs, and I wanted to do something like  that for the maker fair. One challenge for me was that I couldn’t find the right kind of hook to mount my project on the wall , so I ended up (My project was to make pots out of old plastic bottles that also created more planting spaces for people who don’t have much space for gardening. My inspiration for the project stemmed from a planter I saw at the Wellington Botanical Garden that was made from old plastic milk jugs, and I wanted to do something like  that for the maker fair. One challenge for me was that I couldn’t find the right kind of hook to mount my project on the wall , so I ended up ( (This is my maker fair booth being set up) just having the milk bottles as pots on the ground.                                                                                           

The original idea was to make an indoor wall mounted garden with a drainage system and some LED lights, but that proved to be too complicated to finish in like 7 hours, so I decided to do a few different examples of  outdoor planters from old bottles. Something I learned in the process is that no matter how much you plan, you might still screw something up, or discover some kind of design flaw that will force you to comepletly change your presentation or set up. If I had more time, I would’ve  found that hook and mounted my projects on the wall. The hook that I needed probably cost about 8 dollars, although you could probably use a normal hook. The cost of the plants varies depending on the plant, and the rest of the materials are free or very cheap.https://balconygardenweb.com/best-vegetables-to-grow-in-pots-most-productive-vegetables/ This is a link to a website for small space gardening

6B-4a Easy Gardening? Let's Get Cracking: Egg Shell seed starters. August and Charley

          We wanted to do something that involved gardening using everyday stuff. Some people buy plastic trays to start their seeds and then just throw the plastic away so we wanted to find a way to make compostable or reusable seed starters. At first we wanted to turn egg cartons into seed starters, but we realized it wouldn’t work. We did some research and decided to make seed starters out of eggshells instead. Using eggshells as seed starters is a good idea, because once the plants are ready to be re-planted, you can plant the eggshell with the plant. The eggshells decompose in the soil, releasing nutrients that the plant can use to grow faster. The project costed us nothing.

        Over the weekend, we ate a lot of eggs so we could have shells to work with on Monday. When we got back to school, we washed the shells, and poked holes in the bottom for drainage. Then we picked out our seeds, which were parsley and thyme, and planted them. We had 11 shells to use. We put the carton on a windowsill and waited for them to grow. But we came across a problem: the lid of the carton kept on falling down over the eggs. So we took two popsicle sticks and taped them to the bottom and top of each of the sides of the carton to keep the lid up. The solution worked perfectly.

        Throughout the process we learned a lot about gardening and improved on our egg cracking skills. If somebody else was doing the process we’d definitely recommend being really careful when you crack the eggs. If you crack them to high, they’re hard to put soil into and their hard to water, and if you crack them too low, soil falls out and you can’t use them. We wish we could’ve planted more kinds of plants, but we didn’t have the seeds and shells to do so.
Here is a link that helped us out a lot with our project: https://www.southernliving.com/garden/flowers/how-to-start-seeds-in-eggshells-video