Raised vegetable beds made from glass bottles

We have built raised beds in our garden using empty wine bottles. (Any large glass bottles you can find will do).

How:

Just dig a small trench and sink the bottles upside down to just below the bottom of the necks. You will need a lot of bottles!

There are several advantages to planting vegetables in raised beds:

* You can control the soil that goes in each bed (raised beds allow a wider range of plants to be grown on difficult soils or soil with an inappropriate pH as you can fill them with a suitable soil mix. For example you can create compost from food scraps to improve the soil.)

* Raised beds drain well. The improved drainage ensures the soil warms more rapidly in the spring, allowing the vegetable growing season to start earlier.

* they’re a little easier on your back than tending to normal beds.

Other advantages of the bottle raised beds:

* A great way to recycle glass and reuse materials
* You don't need to worry about wood preservative leaching into the soil, or about wood rotting in a few years' time.
* Materials are free
* The bottles look attractive and form beds with soft rounded borders rather than harsh lines

Note:

None of our wine bottles have broken yet - they are fairly sturdy even when struck with a spade. If one does break you can just lift out the broken bottle and replace it, because they're just sunk into the soil rather than concreted in.

If you do use wine bottles, the labels wear off eventually with rain and wind and you are left with clean bottles.