How To Repurpose Old Bottle Caps In Your Garden To Prevent Pests

Your garden is a wonderful spot to get creative and bring your ideas to life. It's also the perfect opportunity to repurpose common trash into adorable garden decor, recovering things that would otherwise end up in a landfill. And you can do more than decorate: If pests are threatening your garden patch, don't toss used plastic bottle caps into the recycling bin. Instead, reuse them to keep unwanted critters away. It's another way to keep your garden slug-free to prevent them from snacking on your dahlias, and the solution is as simple as filling the caps with a little tempting, but deadly, liquid.

Although pesticides are an option, using bottle caps instead avoids harming pollinators or your pets with harsh chemicals. Beverage caps are also a budget-friendly and useful resource available in many sizes, colors, and materials — making them quite versatile for your garden projects — and they'll even add pops of color to your outdoor space.

For starters, bottle caps can be turned into simple liquid-filled traps to discourage crawling critters like earwigs, slugs, and pill bugs, which all love to munch on young plants. You can also glue bottle caps together to create unique plant collars to place around seedlings, protecting them from other earth-bound pests — including cutworms and potato bugs. Even better, these traps and barriers are a cinch to assemble.

The first preventative measure is turning bottle caps into small traps that can quickly reduce the number of crawling critters in your garden. To do this, partially press one or two inverted caps into the soil near plant stems and fill them to just below the rim with beer. The scent lures pests — especially slugs and pill bugs — to climb in, but they won't be able to get back out. Yeasty lagers and blonde ales are especially irresistible to slugs. You can use larger containers, like tuna cans or the bottom half of plastic bottles, effectively against larger pests like slugs and snails. You can also try different liquids: soapy water works well and earwigs like soy sauce. When they're full of floating bugs, empty the caps and either reuse or recycle them.

You can also turn bottle caps into DIY barriers to protect your seedlings. While some gardeners make protective collars out of repurposed toilet paper rolls or plastic bottles, you can skip the scissors by using caps instead. To begin, place a beverage bottle right-side up to measure the circumference. Then, encircle it with colorful bottle caps, hotgluing their sides together — just be careful not to glue anything to the bottle. Stack two to three layers of bottle caps on top of the first, building it three to four caps high. Once the glue has dried, remove the bottle and you'll have a sturdy barrier. The best part is that you can quickly make several of these, and place them around your plants to shield them from pests — a reusable, decorative touch that will brighten your garden season after season.