Recycled CD Plant Markers

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned putting out plant markers for the garlic. Between the weather and my injury its taken me some time to get pictures taken that I could post to accompany a blog entry. Yes, I know that I rarely post pictures, but I thought this post deserved a couple.

We always have random objects in storage because Andrea sees them not as trash, but as materials for future projects. That isn't a bad thing, far from it. In fact, if we had more storage space I suspect we'd have a lot more of that type of stuff. I like the fact that she is an upcycler, which not only re-uses items instead of sending them to the landfill, but gives her a chance to use her creativity.

We have multiple boxes of old CDs and DVDs. I would be afraid to even guess how many we have. They have come from various sources, including disks received through the mail, disks that failed during the burn process, and disks that contain data that we just don't need anymore. I suspect that we have many more old disks than most people, but they aren't hard to come by, even if you don't have any on hand at the moment.

The plant markers are fairly basic. Andrea simply painted the plant names on a couple of CDs, then sandwiched a wooden stake between them. Photos of the markers can be seen here and here. She used stencils and a paint pen for the names, but they could easily be done using spray paint, or freehand using a brush or possibly even a good permanent marker. She placed a CD on each side of the stake, so the marker would be visible from the other side of the bed without requiring a separate stake. That works well for narrow beds, such as my 3ft wide garlic beds, but multiple single sided markers might make more sense in some situations. The CDs were glued to the stakes, then further secured by a nail.

The stakes that we used were landscape stakes, which are convenient as they are pre-sharpened on the end, making them easy to drive into the ground. Any wooden stake could be used, however, including scrap lumber, tree limbs, etc. One could also use metal rods or length of PVC pipe in place of the wooden stakes. I'd like to look into finding something that we could re-purpose as stakes in the future, but for now the wooden landscape stakes are working well, and they're useful to have on hand for other uses.