How Recycled Wine Corks Can Improve The Design Of Your Flower Garden

Planting flowers outside your home is a great way to create a beautiful yard or garden, but sometimes it can be difficult to get your plants evenly spaced from each other. If you're having trouble digging a neat row of spots for your flowers, you may be in luck if you like to drink wine. You can reuse old wine corks for several garden projects, including making a handy spacer to help while planting. It's as simple as attaching a few corks to a board.

Lay the board flat, line up your corks with the same amount of space between them, and screw them into place. Then, you can lay the plank cork-side down on your garden and press it into the soil. When you remove it, perfectly spaced holes will await your flowers. This trick would also work for a small vegetable garden or anywhere you desire evenly-spaced plants.

While corks can help you space your flowers evenly, there are multiple ways to recycle your old wine corks while improving the aesthetic and functionality of your garden. If you find that the potted plants on your patio are not draining well, corks can help with that too. "Use wine corks, instead of buying pot feet for containers," garden designer David Domoney wrote on Instagram. "By elevating your pot, you're creating a gap between the container and the patio allowing the pot to drain effectively and preventing the soil from getting waterlogged." Domoney demonstrated this method on YouTube. 

The weight of the pot should keep them from moving, but if you're worried about them rolling out from underneath, you could try using hot or super glue to permanently hold them in place. The larger the pot, the more wine corks you will need.

If you like to label the plants in your garden, wine corks can be used to make markers. Simply write the name of the plant on the cork with a permanent marker, and push a wooden kitchen skewer into the cork so that it can stand nicely in the soil beside your plant. If you have an abundance of old wine corks, you can also use them to make a planter box that can sit on your patio or in your yard. While your flowers will still need to be planted inside a plastic liner, the cork box is a great way to decorate your garden.

To make the base of the box, you can lay out your corks side by side and use a hot glue gun to secure them. Do the same with the sides of the box, arranging them to whatever height you like, and attach them to the base. If you need to fill in gaps, you can cut your corks to the size you need to fill, and if you don't want to use a plastic liner, you can fill in the cracks between the corks with a clear silicone sealant. Rather than throwing your wine corks in the trash, you can upcycle them to help make your garden even more beautiful and unique.