Keep Your Garden Twine Tangle-Free With TikTok's Genius Water Bottle Hack

If your family drinks a lot of bottled water, you probably have bins of empty plastic bottles on your hands. Your options are to recycle them via your municipal services/private recycling centers or, shock horror, throw them in the trash. Sadly, plastic recycling rates in the U.S. are shockingly low: 29.1% for PET bottles and 29.3% for HDPE bottles in 2018, according to the EPA. So, many of us often choose the latter option. It's hardly surprising, then, that your desire to do the right thing has you looking for easy ways to repurpose your plastic water bottles around the house — or, in this case, the garden shed. In its most basic iteration, all you need for this DIY is an empty, clean plastic water bottle, some sharp scissors, and something to pierce a string-sized hole in the lid.

What makes this upcycled plastic bottle DIY such a handy way to store your gardening twine? For one, it's completely free, or at least you'll only spend the few dollars it cost you for the bottle. You don't need any fancy equipment to cut through the thin, lightweight plastic and can easily affix it to the wall of your garden shed with a simple nail and hammer or electric drill and screw. If the dispenser starts to look dusty or grimy with use, simply wipe it clean with a damp cloth.

The circumference of the plastic bottle should exceed the diameter of an unused ball of your preferred brand of garden twine. You want to give a new ball room to spin. You'll also need some kind of cutting equipment, be it the aforementioned pair of scissors, a utility knife, or, in a pinch, a recently sharpened paring knife from the kitchen. Tool chosen, cut the top one-third or so of the bottle from the base. (Here's your friendly reminder to wear long, cut-proof gloves if cutting the bottle with a knife.)

Next, you need to create a hole in the bottle's lid that's wide enough to smoothly pull a length of twine through. A lit incense stick works great — press it into the lid until it burns a hole through the soft plastic. It should only take a few seconds. Alternatively, an electric drill fitted with a drill bit the size of the string or an awl will also get the job done quick-smart. Before you nail it to the wall, pause and consider whether you want to decorate your new dispenser. Say, for example, you've put a maximalist spin on your garden; if so, use vibrantly-colored paint pens to disguise the plastic bottle. Nail or drill the final product, bottle mouth facing down, onto your garden shed wall at a height of about 2 feet from the floor. It would also work great nailed above your outdoor potting table.

Don't want to mar your walls? Walmart sells Command spring clips for about $12 each. Just cut a slit in the top of the holder and place it on. Finally, unscrew the lid, drop your ball of twine into the funnel, pull free a length of string, thread it through the lid, and screw the lid back on.

You could also keep the bottom half of the bottle. As before, drop your twine inside the top half and thread some through the mouth. Then, press the bottom and top halves back together, sealing them with masking tape. Alternatively, cut the bottle almost all the way through, leaving a sliver of plastic as a hinge. You could also cut just a door for the ball of twine or really level-up the project by hot gluing a fabric zipper to each half of the bottle in place of the masking tape.

If you're not sold on bottles, other items in your garden shed work as makeshift twine holders, too. An old plastic funnel — say, one you once used for pouring liquid fertilizer — works as a direct replacement for the bottle top. Upcycle a small terra cotta planter by dropping a ball of string inside and pulling one end through one of the drainage holes. Cover the open top of the planter with a saucer and flip the set upside down. Voilà! You have a tabletop garden twine dispenser.