Green City Garden Girl: Recycle Beer Kegs Into Cool Garden Planters

Reader Contribution by Kylynn Hull
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KyLynn Hull is a stay-at-home mom and dabbles in many things including writing, urban farming and raising backyard chickens. She writes regularly for garden and food blog, Green City Garden Girl – Bound by the Seasons.

My husband’s parents live in a turn-of-the-century home north of Seattle. His mom grew up in the house during the ’50s and ’60s with her two brothers and a sister. The house has all the charm you would find in a home that old. The house boasts many rooms, rich history and special memories. It also boasts, well, a lot of stuff. 

Many of the rooms contain memorabilia from when my husband and his siblings lived there when they were young. My husband is always trying to bring home many of his findings when reminiscing through drawers and closets. He can’t seem to help himself and has picked up old T-shirts, soccer jackets and all his old matchbox cars. But this time, he wanted to take home two full-size beer kegs. 

Instead of recreating his college hey-day years in my beautiful backyard, he informed me he was going have my Dad cut them in half with his metal cutter and recycle them into garden planters. I hated the idea–kegs in the garden!–how aesthetically pleasing could this be? 

Calmly, I hauled these old, stinky kegs to my parent’s house and asked my Dad to cut them. When I saw the finished product, I warmed up to the idea. My dad left the cool Pabst Blue Ribbon wooden coin sign on the side, and I started seeing the potential of these little hot beds in my garden. 

My “new” garden planters work well in my backyard garden. Photo By KyLynn Hull.

My garden planter used to hold PBR beer! Photo By KyLynn Hull.

I brought them home to my husband’s delight and we filled them up with compost and added some of our banana pepper and cucumber transplants. It’s been a slow start to the garden this year due to all the Pacific Northwest rain, but I’m happy to say, those plants in the ‘garden kegs’ are thriving and actually look pretty cool in the garden–and they attract native wildlife instead of 20-something college kids looking for a free glass of PBR.

  • Published on Jul 19, 2010
Tagged with: Reader Contributions
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