Flickr Find Canned Garden

We found this affordable way to start a garden from Flickr User Happy Sleepy: reuse those giant cans that pizza sauce and stewed tomatoes come in, spray them a fun color (use a rust resistant paint), drill a hole in the bottom for drainage and plant away. More pictures after the jump:

You can talk to your local pizzeria (like Abbot's Pizza Company) and get their extra cans or just save up any cans or jars that you're using in the kitchen.

Comments (12)

this is a great idea! i love it!

I love the sheer creativity of this. It symbolizes much of what we all love. Unique, personal, stylish, and chic reuse.

I love this idea up and down, however I don't know how you'd attach it. :/

beautiful! we've done this out on our back steps.... we're growing all of our herbs in tomato cans... except they're a brand from whole foods with beautiful labels that we've decided to leave intact!

i had one can that i had painted a high gloss red and was growing a couple of sweet pea's in... but they fell victim to the kitten!

yeah -- how are they attached to the brick?

i wondered the same thing as everyone else: how they were attached to the brick. however, if you click the link to her flickr page and view the picture full-size, you can see how it's attached - and it (a) makes sense and (b) looks do-able! hooray!

I'd leave 'em unpainted, in the right urban environment.

i agree with Blandwagon. Two years ago I hung small galvanized buckets that I purchased from Home Depot for about $1.99 each in the paint department. By the end of the summer, the plants weren't doing well and the buckets were rusty. It was a really nice effect -- shiny silver and greens -- for a bit.

First rainstorm hits and you have drainage and all the dirt that comes with it streaming down your walls.

Isnâ€™t it sad that coffee cans are now plastic?

http://www.dcrinteriors.com

There was no dirt streaming down the walls, and as for rust, this is why you have to paint the can or use stainless steel. Galvanized is not enough. The cans you see in the pictures were on their second year. In the third year, I did have to touch up some of the cans with rust paint in the spring. After that we moved and I had to recycle all the cans, so I don't know how long it would have lasted overall.

As for heat, it's true, I had mostly heat loving plants planted: geranium, verbena, thyme. But the petunias also did really well. This wall had a south-west exposure in Toronto - it gets quite hot in the summer. The biggest concern for plant death was actually just running out of water, because the containers are quite small (gallon sized). Many plants love hot conditions right down to their roots, so long as they have water when they need it.