I realize that I’m dating myself when I reveal this, a long shelf of vinyl LPs, one of several in the house. I never listen to them, but I don’t know what to do with them. There’s a lot of common trash in the collection—Does the world need to preserve the billionth pressing of an indifferent rendition of the Pachelbel Canon? Then there’s music so bad that you can’t bear to part with it. Case in point: The Liberace Christmas album, in which Lee recites “The Night Before Christmas.” So badly done it’s a camp classic.
A few holidays ago I decided on a few truly trashable discs and recycled them into flowerpots. It’s one of those craft projects that you can find lots of instructions for out on the web. While visiting John’s aunt last month I saw one of the examples of my handiwork, with a small potted poinsettia set inside the craft project from hell.
Here’s one of the prototypes here at home, holding a potted plant. The hole in the disc for the spindle makes a great little drainage opening. This is more of a tray than pot, but I finally worked out a way to make something that had a nice pot shape to it.
I ended up using two ceramic pots as forms, a small 4-incher and a larger one, around 6 inches. I’d place the disc and smaller pot on a cookie sheet in the oven, with the hole of the disc centered on the hole of the pot. The temperature was set at a low but vinyl-melting temperature, something in the high 200s if I remember correctly. When the disc reached the melting point and began to just sag, I pulled everything out of the oven, placed the larger pot on top of the disc, and these pressed down gently. The disc would assume a nice pot shape and form some attractive crinkles in the space between the two pots. Just let the disc cool a minute and you’re ready for the next one. The fumes from melting vinyl can be pretty intense, unpleasant, and probably not good for you, so this isn’t a project I’d tackle in an unventilated house during the dead of winter. Also, remember that plastic is flammable! Be careful.
Last month John gifted me this USB turntable for transferring vinyl into sound files that I might actually listen to. Now all I need to do in my copious spare time is sort through several hundred discs and decide which few I want to keep, which ones I want to convert and recycle, and those that can be turned into flowerpots right away.
So…
- Original Sargeant Pepper first release: keep…
- Liberace Christmas album: convert but keep (was there any question on that?)…
-
Alternative TV (a British avant-garde rock duo’s album that I bought after reading a glowing review): flowerpot…
- Pierre Boulez conducting Debussy’s La Mer: convert and recycle…
- Anything Barry Manilow: flowerpot (what was I thinking?)…
A similar technique can be used on 45s as well as 12-inchers. Here’s a little Rolling Stones candy dish, for example…
January 30 2010 | Categories: gardening | Tags: craft projects from hell • LPs • pots • recycling | 7 Comments »
Jenny
In keeping with my dark purple and black themes of some recent posts (like
this one), here are a couple pictures Jenny shared with me of some of her plants. This first one is a bromeliad with incredibly striped, almost reptilian leaves. The pumpkin pot is a fun touch for the our current season.
I’m glad it’s a plant, because if I encountered an animal that looked like this I might start walking the opposite direction. Real fast.
Begonia Black Fang
This one, Begonia Black Fang, is a little cuddlier, even literally fuzzy. Dark-colored plants can get lost in the landscaping if you’re not careful, but combined with other interesting plants, like here, they can be great up-close specimens.
Thanks for sharing your pictures, Jenny!
October 22 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: Begonia Black Fang • begonias • black • bromeliads • Jenny • pots | 1 Comment »
Garden pots and planters can be made out of almost anything that can stand up to sun and moisture. Clay, both glazed and unglazed, has been the main material of choice for natural materials, and it can assume all kinds of shapes, sizes and colors. Plastic wins out in the area of man-made materials, combining lighter weight, extremely mold-ability and options for all sorts of colors, usually combined with lower cost.
The three big pots I picked for the new plants on the roof deck are made out of a less unusual material: terrazzo, a concrete that’s been ground down so that you can see the polished aggregate mixed in with the cement matrix. Being made from concrete, they’re heavy—more so than low-glazed ceramic. But I really like their surfaces and the modern profiles of this line from Vietnam. Here’s a closeup of their surface, contrasted here against the leaves of Euphorbia cotinifolia:
Terrazzo planter detail
Concrete planters are used commonly in commercial situations because of their extreme sturdiness, but this terrazzo finishing technique looks to be fairly uncommon. (A web search found lots of outlets in Australia, but not the U.S.) But fortunately they’re available here in San Diego at Walter Anderson Nursery. They’re not super-cheap—maybe double the cost of similarly-size ceramic pots at home stores, but they’re not ridiculous, either.
August 13 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design | Tags: planters • pots • terrazzo | 3 Comments »
I had a mountain of unwanted plastic pots, mostly in the 3-5 inch size, leftovers from when I was growing more than just a few orchids around the house. The pots were used, a little old, but basically functional. I couldn’t part with them—who knows when I’d need them? After a couple years of goading from John, a couple hundred of them went to the landfill last fall.
Then I heard about the Missouri Botanical Garden having a great idea. They’ve started up a program to recycle those unwanted leftover plastic pots into something useful.
Garden pots and trays have been recycled into landscape timbers, useful for building retaining walls and landscape borders. Each timber measures 7-inches X 9-inches by 8.5 feet long, weighs 280 pounds, and lasts for up to 50 years.
Well, yeah, Missouri would be a little far to go next time I have a pile of pots I need to part with. But I’ll be a little more diligent in looking around for more sustainable solutions than dumping them!
April 06 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: plastic • pots • recycling | No Comments »
