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Green Gardening

Tips for making less garden garbage

Here are some tips for reducing the amount of plastic from your garden.

By Beth Botts, Chicago Tribune staff reporter

REDUCE

• Grow plants from seed or cuttings. "Every seed you start at home, that's a pot you don't have to buy," says Tim Johnson, director of horticulture at the Chicago Botanic garden in Glencoe.

• Buy compost or mulch in bulk, rather than in bags.

• Buy fertilizer in a concentrate and mix it up in your watering can.

• Take cardboard boxes to the nursery for the plants you buy so you don't need to take home plastic flats.

• Plant perennials rather than annuals and long-lived perennials rather than short-lived ones. Every plant you don't have to replace is a pot you didn't buy.

• Ask mail-order nurseries how they pack plants for shipment. Avoid those that depend on molded plastic and foam-peanut packaging.

RESUE

• When you start seeds, reuse plastic six-packs and flats, or use other existing containers such as yogurt cups (poke a hole for drainage and wash in a 10% bleach solution.) Or make newspaper pots: www.chicagotribune.com/pots

• Save plastic pots, clean them and use them to repot.

• Donate pots to plant sales, school gardens or other non-profits.

RECYCLE

• Ask the nurseries and home centers where you shop if they will take their pots back for recycling.

• Urge your municipality to take No. 2, 4, 5, and 6 plastics for recycling.

• Ask the garden businesses where you shop to urge their industry to standardize pots, use recyclable plastics, seek biodegradable materials, mark pots with recycling codes and take responsibility for the waste they sell.