Topic: growing thing in old milk cartons website?

[Nora42]

DId I imagine a post about how to grow using recycled milk cartons? was there a web site from a gentleman ?

ring any bells anyone
Nora

[Jayb]

Possibly New Recycling Ideas(I CAN? CAN YOU?) by JRP http://www.allotments4all.co.uk/smf/index.php/topic,7549.460.html

Some fantastic ideas and uses for recycling plastic bottles.

[Nora42]

Thanks JayB
that's exactly the thread I was looking for .

I want to show the school how they can recycle their plastic milk bottles.

Nora

[Jayb]

His Facebook page is good too  www.facebook.com/groups/john.jrp/ 

[Digeroo]

Plastic milk bottles can be a pain.  Unlike the clear bottles they are affected by weathering.  So after a year they break up into tiny shards and it takes a lot of effort to pick them out of the soil.
Personally I would not recommend them in the garden. 

Suggest you recycle by putting them into the plastic recycling.  Clear plastic is much better in the garden it stays intact for years and can they be retrieved and then recycled.

Ordinary bottles can be made into towers and used for vertical gardens.

[artichoke]

Sorry, I don't agree. For perhaps 13 years I have been using plastic milk bottles to transport water to my waterless site, and while they do eventually develop leaks it is due to rough treatment (being dropped) or being pierced by something. Then I recycle them. They really do last for several years. I have never experienced the shards you describe, and I am sure my local shop does not stock anything other than the norm.

In fact I use recyclable glass bottles from the milkman normally - it is only when hordes of people come to stay that they rush out and buy these plastic bottles, and I insist they buy the biggest ones to be the most useful for water storage. One of the jobs for the younger ones is to fill bottles from the garden tap and help me to take them to the plot. I would never bother with that if hadn't worked well over all this time. When they start slow leaks, I place them next to something that needs slow watering with no run off, useful in a hot dry summer.

I am not a great fan of JRP because these bottles are so unsightly (as are mine), but I suppose his system must work as he has been promoting it for a very long time.

[cornykev]

Transporting water is OK but as Dig says if left in the garden all years round they do break up into the soil. 

[artichoke]

Yes, I do leave them out in the garden all the year round, for years at a time. This is very puzzling - I genuinely have never known them break into shards as described. They just get damaged, trodden on, wheeled over and punctured. Some of them lie about empty (I hang them from a tree in bundles) and some are stacked in a pile, full of water. I have 8 big bottles full of water supporting a heavy old window, currently sheltering some spinach beet - those bottles have been sitting there doing their job since early last spring, and they certainly weren't new when I decided to use them in this way.

I also use them (full) to weigh down netting and soil covering when I run out of bricks.

Maybe East Sussex milk suppliers use stronger plastic than elsewhere? These look exactly like the ones that JRP uses (though he uses clear plastic drinks bottles as well): jug shaped with handles and screw tops, milky white flexible plastic.

Difficult to explain our differing experience with these bottles.

[Ian Pearson]

Possibly some types are made from biodegradable plastic. Desirable if they are going to landfill, but annoying if one is trying to reuse them.

[amphibian]

I've used milk bottles, filled with water, as weights and I have used them as cane tops under netting - mine have never broken down after years of use.

[cacran]

I have had some water in plastic milk containers for 8 years, stored in my allotment. They have not leaked or broken yet. I kept them in case of draught. lol. Never had one yet!