www.sha.org/bottle/wine

In tandem with Anthony Giglio’s summer sparkling wine recommendations, it seems fitting to reprise the idea we published a couple of years ago: using water or wine bottles as plant watering globes. These are simply inverted bottles that you fill with water and slam into the moist soil of a containered plant; they will slowly trickle water into your plant’s roots, a great solution for watering plants while you’re out of town for the weekend or just busy.

We first saw the idea in a post at Radmegan: In Words and Pictures.  Crafty blogger Megan described improvising watering globes out of glass Coke bottles and Martinelli Cider bottles (see her images below)

We wondered: why use an ugly bottle with a label when there are so many beautiful glass bottles to be had? Why not figure out some pleasing-to-look at solutions?

 

Our favorites for many years (and many purposes) are wine or champagne bottles with the labels soaked off, which allows you see their form: sensual, sculpture, subtly-colored. (We especially like the elongated bottles used for Albariño – a perfect summer wine from Spain. ) We’ve long used wine bottles as cheap, chic water decanters to place on the dinner table.  They’d work fine doing double duty as watering globes, (we’d just have to make sure to wash them well before putting them back on the table).

wine bottles used as water decanter
sally schneider

…We were also imagining inexpensive long-neck laboratory flasks that come in a variety of sizes…

…when we remembered an extraordinary hand-blown, round-bottomed bottle we saved after we drank the divine, small-batch Cava called Kripta we bought back from Spain many years ago. The producer, Augusti Torello felt that the unique wine should be drunk at one sitting, so made the bottle impossible to set down. It was so beautiful, we just couldn’t bear to part with it, and thought that one day we’d find a use for it, beyond memory-keeper.

To soak the label off a bottle, simply immerse it in a deep container of hot water to loosen the glue; then slip the label off.

…so many possibilities for making d-i-y ANYTHING stylish and original right there in front of you. All you have to do is look around.

Related posts: 5 delish, affordable sparkling wines for summer
wine bottles as chic, cheap water decanters

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2 replies on “best of il: diy plant watering globes

  1. beautiful objects………..a pleasure to look at whatever their us is.

  2. Love the bottles you show…my favorite is the lovely cobalt colored bottle from Ty Nant, the Welsh specialty water. Classic, clean, rounded shape in an intense blue with the merest fine 1/4″ line of clear glass at the neck. Comes in two sizes so one may mix and match…a rose in one, the other used as a watering “globe” sitting among my other variously sized cobalt globes…makes up for my fried lobelia and delphiniums in our 110 degree heat. Cool Blues!!

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