Repurposing Old Blinds

Our neighbours are renovating their basement suite and taking all sorts of things to the landfill. One day, we saw them loading some old window blinds into their van. "Wait!" shouted my partner, "are those window blinds??"

Yep, they were... those old flimsy thin metal blinds that are so annoying. What the heck could we possibly want with them? Well... reduce... reuse... repurpose!

We had visited one of the community gardens in the spring for their plant sale. They produce a LOT of flower and veggie seedlings and all of those little pots need plant tags. What do they use? Old metal window blinds! Yep, they cup them into 4-6" pieces, and then stick the plant labels (printed out) on the blinds. They work perfectly!

Ever since then... we've been on the hunt for old window blinds. And we found them next door! We happily carted two sets of window blinds back to our place where they lay on the ground for several weeks. 

We only need one set as it will make tonnes and tonnes of plant tags for us. The other set... we thought we could take it to the community garden, because they are always looking for more window blinds.

After getting in the way of lawn mowing several times, I decided to just sit down and cut up our set of old blinds. They are so thin that a pair of sturdy scissors worked just fine.

The one set of blinds made hundreds of plant tags, more than enough to keep us going for quite a while!

And they work great in the little pots that we have planted up for sale. Right now, we are using a wax pencil on the tags but I think a Sharpie would work as well. 

This system works way better than going to Home Depot and buying some cheapo plastic plant tags. I love it when we find something that works so well! And when the plant tags reach the end of their days, we can take them to metal recycling and not throw them away. Win-win-win.