- Your yard is like a canvas.

It can have your own aesthetics, but most of us simply don't have the money to make our landscaping dreams come true.

We reached out to different gardeners who have made some beautiful, clever and dirt-cheap repurposed planters, and we share them all here.

People - That are just like, oh, this junk, I'm just gonna get rid of it.

A lot of scrounging and some curiosity and some maybe like finagling.

Make it as easy and - Affordable.

Affordable as possible.

Be creative and think about ways that you could repurpose it - Once we're gonna be able to kick our feet up and just relax and say we did this - Quick thank you to our sponsors, Merit Medical and Red Butte Garden, who helped make these videos possible.

- Welcome.

- Now meet Alyssia and Will who turned a large corner of their backyard into a raised garden area.

- And because we have dogs, built a fence around it so they couldn't go in there and have a smorgasborg whenever they wanted.

- Alyssia knew she wanted a colorful flower border around her garden and that's when she remembered the tire pyramid.

- It all started about 10 years ago with a Pinterest idea.

I saw this pyramid of tires and I basically just like kind of drew out what I was wanting and then he came up with the rest.

- This is designed is pretty much all her.

She tells me what she wants done and I do it.

- There's a lot of people on Marketplace who are actually giving them away for free 'cause they don't want to dispose of them, so I think it's pretty easy to find them.

- After doing further research on the tire planters, she discovered that tires will most likely leak toxins into the soil over time.

But to compensate for the toxin issue, she found smaller planters to fit into the center of the tires.

The center pot also makes it easier to plant the flower and rearrange them - Over time as the paint comes off the tires, it allows to take the plants out and redo the tires - In their front yard.

They had a dried creek bed feature that really wasn't doing anything for them, so they took it apart and moved the rocks to their backyard garden, calling it a grateful garden.

- When we have visitors and people come over, they can pull a rock from the rock garden that we've made in that area and we've turned it into the Grateful Garden so people can write on the rocks something they're grateful for, and we can not only share it with ourselves, but share our backyard with our friends and family and people who come over.

- I always tell people that your garden is your personal place and it needs to tell your story.

- Maria is a landscaper, gardening coach, and consultant, and if you caught our Landscaping on a Budget episode, you'll know that Maria has some tricks up her sleeve when it comes to saving money.

- And one of those ways is to repurpose some old antique things that I have inherited or received.

- Maria's husband grew up on a dairy farm and her father-in-law still had some of the old farming equipment from the thirties and forties, including this antique fertilizer spreader.

- And when I saw it, I asked him if it was something that he would be willing to part.

And he said, "This old thing?"

And I said, I would love to have some history in my garden.

- Now Maria warns that the antique farm equipment can be very heavy to move.

So once it's in place, it's pretty stationary.

- I need plants that have shallow roots 'cause it's not very deep.

So I've had very good success with overwintering sedums and different succulents and a few perennials, actually.

- She then drilled a hole into the back of it and installed a drip line So I really never touch this planter.

It does its own little thing and comes back year after year - To add to her repurposed farm equipment motif, she acquired this antique milk jug and tiller from a neighbor that was disposing of them.

- So this is a sumac shrub, but I love the fall color, so I decided to plant it in one of the milk jugs - Because sumac can be aggressive and take over an area, Maria contains it in the milk jug.

- Once again, another item that is low maintenance.

I don't really have to do anything with it.

This could have ended up in the landfill, could have just gone in the trash.

And I think history needs to be preserved it when it's beautiful.

- I'm a nurse by profession, but I really have a passion for gardening on the side.

It's my relaxation thing to do.

- When Kelli and her partner bought their house four years ago, they knew they wanted to have a huge garden, but they also wanted to do it on a budget.

- And we also wanted to do a lot of upcycles and thrift finds.

- Kelli loved the simple modern aesthetic of those large metal planters, but she didn't love the price tag.

That's when she discovered filing cabinets.

- You can really get them for free on Facebook Marketplace since nobody has a purpose for filing cabinets anymore, for their original use.

So we got ours at Deseret Industries, I think maybe one from Savers, and some from Facebook Marketplace, but we didn't spend more than $10 on a filing cabinet - When laid horizontally as planters.

Not only do they have that sleek industrial look, but they are at great heights so you don't have to bend over in the garden.

Kelli uses the soil, compost, and clippings from her garden to fill the filing cabinets.

- This is our herb garden.

Our back door kind of comes out right here.

So for the kitchen, we wanted some herbs close to the kitchen.

So we have parsley and then we have like a purple basil.

We have some sage, lemon grass.

This is a Thai basil, which I think is just incredibly beautiful - For their herb planters.

They use two larger filing cabinets, but for single plants like squash, they use a smaller filing cabinet.

- They come in a lot of sizes so you can really measure them out and find some to fit your space.

- Kelly also found 50 gallon food barrels on classifieds that had already been cut in half for five bucks each.

She used them around her garden, but also along her back fence as an alleyway garden.

- We've had those since we moved in.

That was kind of our first foray into gardening and raised beds was these little food barrels.

And so I have a couple in the back that are about two and a half years old and they haven't needed any maintenance at all, and they were a very inexpensive, easy way for us to get started on raised beds without having to do any massive construction.

- So over 7 billion tons of plastic waste have been generated globally since the 1950s.

Less than 10% of that has been recycled.

Most plastics are dumped elsewhere, burned or lost to the environment.

- This is Leo, a student at the University of Utah.

When we caught him, he was interning with the sustainability office and had just completed an ecobrick planter.

Ecobricks are created by taking used plastic bottles and packing them with other plastics, essentially making a plastic brick.

- They're also like really cheap to make because it's just plastics you buy every day, like you get a plastic bag or you eat cereal and you have that plastic bag left over.

It's just whatever plastics you have lying around.

- You just want to make sure that the plastics are clean and dry to prevent mold from growing in your ecobrick.

- So for this really basic demo garden I did, I just grabbed some wire I already had in my house and just tied it together.

There are other ways you can go about it in way more like useful and fun ways.

- People around the world have used ecobrick for insulation, fences, furniture, and in this case a planter box.

- But you also have to remember these do have lifespans.

So like for short term, which is what mine is, - Yeah - They're good for two to three years before they start eroding into the soil.

- Okay.

- So if you're doing short term, you just gotta keep that lifestyle in mind.

But if you're doing it for like a garden where you're encasing them in clay or you're building furniture, they can last for far longer.

And so they're just, it really just, you have to know the context of what you're using it for.

- Leo says, with short-term ecobricks, once they start to erode, you can cut them up and pack them into a new ecobrick or recycle them - And they're just like a fun, creative way to combat excess plastic we put out into our environment - For this amazing toilet planter you see we met up with Lyndsey and Andy.

They both work at Red Butte Garden where Lyndsey is a horticulturist and Andy is a gardener.

Now, full disclosure here, when we filmed this about two years ago, Red Butte Garden was not a sponsor of ours.

But as you notice at the beginning of this episode, Red Butte Garden is now a sponsor of Modern Gardener.

However, we loved the repurposed planters and wanted to include them in this episode.

- So Red Butte Garden wanted to focus some of their interpretation, signage on water conservation and climate change.

And so we wanted to add a little levity and so we thought we'd do something silly, like have a little bathroom scene, we call it.

Yeah, a toilet bowl's never smelled so good.

- They saw a great opportunity for this type of educational message in the children's garden.

- Water use at home is totally one of the things that kids have in their power, and we wanted to make it really lighthearted for kids specifically.

So they're just talking about ways they, they can use water more wisely in their lives in a really light way.

- They reached out to the local Habitat for Humanity ReStore and found an old sink and toilet that they spray-painted and repurposed as a planter.

We were specifically looking for things that were broken, maybe couldn't be used.

- And also we need drainage.

So, you know, broken stuff was okay for us - To stay true to the water conservation theme.

They used plants in a very clever way.

A string of pearls growing out of a disco ball beneath the shower head resembling some sprinkling water.

They used drought-tolerant plants and flowers overflowing from the toilet and sink.

These big gray ones are Sesleria called Angel Wings Around the toilet we have Dichondra, which is normally used as like a spiller, but we used it as just a very low grower.

Some lobelia in there, which I wasn't totally sure of 'cause it doesn't like wet feet.

And so I also planted a Euphorbia diamond snow.

It's a super heat-tolerant, drought-tolerant plant, and I liked the way it looked like bubbles When considering repurposed household items or appliances as planters.

Lyndsey and Andy say to just have fun with it.

- This was definitely an experiment for us.

Like I say, we were experimenting with some of these plants.

The garden is definitely a dynamic thing.

So yeah, go try it and see how it goes.

- Like I always say, gardening is not about the end result, it's about the journey.

See you next time.