Visited a community garden in Portland last weekend and saw someone using wine bottles as edging for their raised beds

It looked pretty cool honestly. They had them upside down, buried about halfway, lined up all along the border. I asked the guy how long they'd held up and he said three years with no cracking or shifting. Anyone tried this for their own beds? Thinking about collecting bottles from the recycle center.

2 comments

2 Comments

simontorres24d ago

Wait, you're REALLY not worried about glass breaking in a garden where people walk around barefoot? I get that they look nice but that's a HARD no from me. Even if they're buried halfway, one freeze-thaw cycle and those things could crack into shards you won't find until you step on them. Plus, what happens when the bottles eventually break and you're trying to pull tiny glass pieces out of your soil for years? Seems like a disaster waiting to happen just for some "cute" edging. I'll stick with wood or stone, thanks.

joseph_hart23d ago

My buddy Mark tried the bottle edging thing two years ago down in zone 7a. He spent a whole weekend digging them in and they looked GREAT for about one season. Then a hard freeze in February split like 8 of them right at the soil line and he didn't even notice until July when his kid stepped on a piece that had worked its way up. He spent the next two summers picking little green glass shards out of that flower bed every time he weeded. He finally just ripped the whole border out and went with plain old concrete blocks, said it wasn't worth the headache for the "cute factor.