Rice and Pasta, Please!: Chopsticks…in the garden

It’s mid-spring here in Central Ohio, and time to get veggie gardens prepped for planting in a few weeks. I have two raised beds in my backyard, a 4X8 patch made out of cedar planks and a long, skinny 1X16 bed (new this year!) behind my garage. Everytime I go outside to work in the gardens, I find a new use for old chopsticks--chopsticks that are losing their paint/lacquer or that have been misshapen and dried out from the dishwasher. If your family eats with chopsticks, chances are that you have several old pairs that are ready to retire to the garden.

Here are three eco-friendly ideas that you can use this spring:

1. Use chopsticks to secure weed cloth to the ground.

When installing a new raised bed, one of the first steps is to lay down some type of weed cloth or landscape fabric as a barrier to weeds before adding your soil. After laying down the cloth, instead of metal garden staples (which often have to be purchased separately from garden centers), grab a few chopsticks. As long as the soil is relatively soft, you should be able to push the chopsticks through the cloth into the ground to serve as an eco-friendly (and cost-efficient) alternative to the staples.

2. Use chopsticks to poke holes for planting seeds.

Sure, you can use your finger, but if you (or any children helping you) don’t like dirty fingers, use a chopstick to poke holes for seeds. If you prefer an accurate measure of how deep you’re planting the seed, mark inches or centimeters off with a sharpie or pencil on your chopstick before you poke it into the soil.

2. Use chopsticks to mark your rows.

After planting your seeds, use the same chopstick as a row marker. Simply write the name of your plant (again, a sharpie works great) on the chopstick, and you have a eco-friendly reminder of where you've planted the seeds.