Lotsa Pots?

I'm sure we've all seen those lovely pictures of gardens where every conceivable type of container has been pressed into service to hold a plant - old galvanised buckets and watering cans, teapots, wellies, mixing bowls, preserving pans, you name it, there's a plant growing in it.

One of my daughters lives in a property with what the Estate Agent called a 'courtyard garden' and everyone else would call 14 sq.m. of paving slabs. Containers are what she wants, all shapes and sizes, everything considered. Can you find them? Can you 'ell as like. There isn't a charity shop, boot fair, skip or junk shop she hasn't raided and so far, all she's got is a small 'pop-up' bag from the £1 shop (and only then because I took pity on her!).

Is our reliance plastic making the 'interesting' containers a thing of the past, or is she just not looking hard enough?

 

i got lots of mine from boot fairs

salvage yards are good too - what area does she live in?

loopy

 

Jings, I see plenty of old shoes and cracked jugs and basins in the Charity shops.
Maybe she's going to places that are too posh !

 

She lives in Kent where we have a boot fair of some description every week it seems, although no salvage yards. In some of the towns (within about a 30 mile radius), there are as many as 5 charity shops almost next door to one another - you could be right Alice, they may be too 'posh', but if that's all there is, then that's all there is. I suspect it's not so much that she goes to posh places, rather that the people who run the charity shops, boot fairs etc., just throw away the sort of stuff she's after on the 'no-one will buy that' assumption. Rather like Lord Sugar - her search continues!

 

Maybe she could ask to see if there is anything they have set aside to go to trash(at the stores).....cant hurt to ask.

My old neighbour used to grow all his herbs in childrens rubber boots.....it looked so cute.

 

Local recycle centers are usually a good haunt for all kinds of potential garden pots, trouble is though our local center has stopped selling the stuff and everything is now slung in the skips :confsd:

 

What about Freecycle? It might be worth joining and putting up a note saying that you want any kind of old pots, containers, etc...you never know, someone might have plenty of plastic pots they don't want and might be happy for someone to come collect them.

 

Just to say thank you to all who replied with suggestions and to report there's been some success.

Asda were selling some small metal jugs (like the big old enamel ones) so she bought 2 of those; in Homebase I found a metal bin with a dent in it, which they let me have for nothing; there was a small metal bucket in another shop which had lost it's handle - mine for a few coins in their charity box and finally in the supermarket, another metal bucket (presumably an ice-bucket since it had 'Budweiser' painted on it) formerly part of some promotion and randomly left, forgotten, on a shelf - again mine for nothing since they couldn't find a bar code for it.

I'm not sure the neighbours were too happy about my banging holes in the bottom of these 'finds', but my daughter's had a great time spraying them different colours - not exactly my choice, but already her garden is beginning to look a bit more cheerful and we're both anxious to see what else we can discover.