Five Easy Ways to Make a No-work Hanging Basket

A hanging basket for flowers or vegetables can cost a lot of money if you buy it but you can quickly make a beautiful basket at home at no cost for a natural garden, upon organic lines and items you have around the house. Better still, follow this plan and the basket will water itself!

Minimal watering means less work. Plus you can be confident that your precious transplants won't die in a hot season. You don't need to buy water-absorbent pellets. There's a better way to make a hanging eco-basket free of charge and in moments.

If you can't obtain a wicker basket, find any recyclable pot that you can disguise in decorative cloth. If necessary, hold the compost in place by lining the basket with nylon stockings. They last for ever. You might also use lawn moss or large leaves such as rhubarb or comfrey. Even old tea bags.

Make your basket self-sufficient in water

This idea is important! Drop in a pot for water. Find a small sturdy polythene bag, the kind that won't degrade. Pack it with some inert water absorbent substance. Perlite and vermiculite are ideal. True, they're costly but you can clean them after use with boiling water and re-use them indefinitely.

Here's another idea for an absorbent filler: barbecue charcoal. It has the extra virtue that it sweetens the soil. After use, you can wash it, dry it and recycle it on your barbie!

Put your plastic bag reservoir in the hanging basket, leaving plenty of room at the top, sides and base for compost. Top up the reservoir with water. Put a deep layer of compost on top.

Drop in your transplants above the water reservoir so that, over time, their roots will grow into the watering pot. Moisten the compost lavishly.

Now it's safe to go on vacation for a week or more. Your plants will do fine.

Grow plants out of the base and sides too

It's very easy to customise that basket - and irrigation device - to grow plants from every surface of the basket too. But for this, you need a stiffer container than a baggy.

Halve a plastic milk or soft drinks container to make a small pot. Put in charcoal again or any sterile water-retentive thing that's very light. You can even use loft insulation 'wool'. Now poke openings in the sides and base of the basket for your transplants.

How do you water those plants? Here's another tip: trail some capillary ribbons out of the water pot before you add your compost.

Two more gardening tips: Never purchase capillary strips or mats! Just use bootlaces or bits of window sash, or slice strips out of a nylon sock or pantihose and twist them. Water will seep along them. Avoid anything like cotton that quickly degrades.

Wind those ribbons about the base of the plants. Top up the inner pot with water and drench the whole basket as well. All plants will then get enough water over the season. Except in the hottest season, the eco-basket should need watering only every week.

How can you find a free hanging basket?

It's possible to raise a vast amount of beautiful blossoms - and salads - in a big hanging eco-basket. A good tip is to get a used two gallon plastic tub. Restaurants and builders will have lots of them.

Make sure they once held food items or something equally innocuous - but watch out for toxins! Perforate every side lavishly.

Maybe the keg has a handle already but you can readily hang it with cord or wire. Camouflage the keg using a strip of earth-coloured rug or other decoration.

One more idea to get a no-cost basket is those big polythene nets often found holding fruit or potatoes. Look for a discarded fisherman's net next time you're at a beach, and it will look very decorative too.

Of course, you don't have to grow flowers alone in a hanging basket. Cherry tomatoes are a natural. They even grow well upside down!

Upside down tomatoes? It's a very smart strategy because you have two growing areas - top and bottom. Push the tomato transplant through the base of the basket and hold it in place securely so it won't drop out under its heavy crop. Then plant herbs or little vegetables above the basket and all around it.

Design your hanging baskets like this and your watering chores are over. Of course, that's a boon if you've hung those baskets in some place that's hard to reach. Whenever you spot gardeners purchasing baskets, murmur in their ears 'plastic milk jugs and old nylon socks'. They might think you're mad, but who's crazy - really?


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Dr John Yeoman PhD is director of the center for natural gardening ideas, the Gardening Guild.
You'll find a wealth of
ingenious plans to grow more food in a garden with
less cost and effort in his
practical book Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening
Success. Get it entirely free at:
http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy