DIY bottle tree
This was my winter project, 4x4 post painted turquoise, screws to hold the bottles, a birdhouse from the craft store that I painted and added a FL license plate as a roof.
Comments (23)
Shades_of_idaho
5 years agolast modified: 5 years ago
threedogsmom
5 years agoRelated Discussions
blue bottle tree with hanging bottles
Comments (10)Donna, Wooden dowels. I would take post hole diggers, dig a hole, take one bag of concrete. Pour the concrete around a 4" x 4" post in the hole you dug. The next day- Take a drill bit the size of the wooden dowel thickness and drill holes for your dowel branches. You can use screws with closed hoop ends (eye screws). Rope, shoe string leather, or wire your bottles to the eye screws on the branches. I also would polyurethan the entire wooden structure before hanging the bottles. I believe the open mouth up was the original way that a bottle tree was meant to be hung. They were meant to ward off evil spirits. The scary sound of the wind over the mouth of a bottle would certainly do that. The different depths of rain in the bottles will make the notes vary and it will become what is called a wind organ. My concern would be that the bottles would become mosquito breeding beds and the bottles may get water stains and other bugs on the inside. (??????) I'm speculating. I have considered this for my own garden, so I've thought about it a lot. Hope something here helps. I cant wait to see your bottle collection!!!!! Susie...See More15'X28' Do-it-Yourself Greenhouse
Comments (16)7000ft, I am totally convinced you ought to write a book. Your family sounds very interesting and it sounds like you all work as a cooperative of sorts. How much of your food do you produce? The tomatoes that I grow are primarily for sauce, so I use Roma-type tomatoes. They are odd-looking, being long and quite large. The variety I grew this year was Super San Marzano. I've tried some others, but this one is the best. The sauce-type tomatoes are awesome for making sauce. They are very meaty with minimal juice and seeds. Making sauce is a breeze because you can skip the steps for squeezing the juice and seeds out. According to the catalogs, some varieties have pectin in them that helps to thicken the sauce. We ended up with 25 jars of sauce in the freezer. That is a record for us, so we are pleased! That's 25 dinners during ski season that I don't have to cook. :) I also grow a cherry tomato and some sandwich-type tomatoes. I've had good luck with Early Wonder, which is early yet tasty. (way better than early girl!) Inside the GH we enjoy our first tomatoes in mid-July. Without the GH we are lucky to get any red tomatoes at all. I'm sure it's the same for you. My gardening efforts are pretty much solo, but my husband was instrumental in building the GH and in helping look after things as needed. He is an expert at raising seedlings because I tend to travel a lot in the spring. He also built a root cellar and he is fully on board with our quest to grow as much food as possible. It's a bit of an oddball pursuit, so I'm happy that he's into it!...See MoreGrandfathers Tree Becomes A Bottle Tree
Comments (7)Can not imagine 'dopeheads' being anywhere but here. The fire had to put a lot of shock through your nervous system, seeing what you were losing and not knowing where or when it would stop. Traumatic. Dopers stripe their own home of copper and live in darkness. We have thought about a small community garden to get them slowly involved - nothing yet. Life is full of sour happenings it seems, that can become very polarizing. Gardening is great therapy for me - mentally and physically. I am aware that I shut down at times because so much needs to be done now (or what can be put off). This happens more often than I want. Oh, "blue bottles" are suppose to capture the worst spirits my sis said. I am going for all blue now, because of living here. It would not surprise me to awake tomorrow and the tree be totally stripped. I got radishes yesterday and the Dahlias keep coming up. I quit counting. Time to pot up some more rooted cutting this coming week. ........life in the fast lane....See MoreDo-It-Yourself Wall-O-Water
Comments (29)For a couple of years I had a garden spot away from my house, with no water supply available so if I wanted to supplement rainfall I had to haul gallon jugs of water. To make my watering efficient, when I planted my peppers & tomatoes in the spring, I dug down and buried empty gallon plastic jugs, one between each plant. I had poked 4-5 holes in the bottom of each, of course, and left the caps on until later in the summer. Once the weather warmed, and after a good soaking rain, I mulched the beds 4-6" deep with chopped leaves, being sure to cover the tops of the (so far empty and still capped) bottles to protect them from the sun since I had found that the plastic degrades and becomes brittle when exposed to the sun. (In previous years, just cultivating around the bottles inevitably resulted in my breaking the tops off by midsummer.) When the weather reached a point where I actually needed to water, I cleared the mulch away for the moment and poured a gallon of water into each buried bottle. I set the cap loosely back atop each bottle to keep the leaf debris from falling in and clogging the exit holes in the bottom, then pulled the mulch back up to protect the plastic. I did not care about how long it took for the bottle to empty-- it seemed like a gallon or two a week per plant was sufficient, and the best part is that by burying the bottles the water went right down to the root zone where it was most effective. As for using wall-o-waters, since I had gotten some free from a friend, I tried them last year with 3 really early tomato plants I started specifically to experiment with. While they survived a good bit of frosty weather, in the end the plants I had started weeks later and planted out a month after the first ones when the weather had warmed quickly caught up to the wall-o-water ones and all the tomatoes pretty much bloomed & set fruit at the same time & rate. So my conclusion is that it was satisfying to my eager gardener's soul to be out planting early, but it really made no difference in overall plant performance. I have found the same to be true with early plantings of such things as peas and salad crops, too. Early plantings may survive, but later plantings quickly catch up and may even surpass earlier ones that have been stressed by the weather....See MoreShades_of_idaho
5 years ago
steiconi
5 years agolast modified: 5 years agothreedogsmom
5 years agoShades_of_idaho
5 years agolast modified: 5 years agoBottle tree is up as far as I can go for now. I need some thing for the top and maybe some more bottles. There is some mirror mosaic on a couple of them. I have to much else to do to take time to do more now. Maybe later. Just a little bit for here and there. Dang staging is not my forte. I forgot to move the shovels. LOL These bottle have been sitting in a box in the garage for years. Thank you for the push to get them out there in the yard where they belong.
What I ended up using to hold them onto the post is the heavy wires I cut off between the cattle panel fencing. I have lots of them as I fenced this whole place in the last few years. I saved those because I knew they would be useful. Never even thinking of a bottle. so I bought the threaded rods and can take two of them back or find some thing else to use them on.I can pull the rods out if I need to because of the deep snow. The totem has been in my yard for years left out all winter. It is getting kind of tired.
threedogsmom thanked Shades_of_idahothreedogsmom
5 years ago
The_Kat
5 years agoShades_of_idaho
5 years agosteiconi
5 years agoShades_of_idaho
5 years agoThe_Kat
5 years agoShades_of_idaho
5 years agoThe_Kat
5 years agoI only mosaicked one bowling ball (somewhere I have some old bowling balls I picked up at thrift stores and rummage sales ready to mosaic) and it was made at a crafting class. The woman had us use a tile adhesive/grout combination and we just pressed the stained glass piece into it. That stuff held up like steel. It is resistant to cracking, expanding, and shrinking. As far as I know it only comes in white. Here is the bowling ball I did:
The stand it is on was from one of those old halogen floor lamps that were all the rage in the late 1990s. That one had a tripod base with shelves. My husband reconfigured it so it was shorter (about 3 feet tall) with one shelf at the bottom. The part the bowling ball is on was where the bowl-like shade went for the lamp. The rust thing in the background is "Screech" a junk bird I bought at a craft store. Here he is in another picture where you can see him better:
Shades_of_idaho
5 years agoThe_Kat
5 years agoI found SimpleFix adhesive/grout at Home Depot. It comes in quart pre-mixed containers for $9.47 (you could probably do a few bowling balls with that much) and it comes in white and "alabaster". It was nice to use because it dried quickly and the stained glass stayed put.
Here is Quackers my other "junk" bird. I wonder if he is similar to your shovel bird. (You can see another planter I had that year with impatiens and coleus.)
Shades_of_idaho
5 years ago
PKponder TX Z7B
5 years ago
Shades_of_idaho