Recycled Bird Bath Becomes Garden Plant Stand

This recycled bird bath is now being put to use as a great looking plant stand. You’ll never believe how it came to be!

My husband is the king of finding things that I can recycle to use in my garden. Last year, it was a set of musical instruments that made a great garden display.

This year it is a whole host of things that I am incorporating as the weeks go by into one of my garden beds. 

We never seem to let an item go to waste if there is any use for it in my garden. Recycling is a small step that we can take to protect the environment at home.

This Recycled Bird Bath is now doing double duty as a plant stand in my test garden.

Richard was taking the dogs for a walk recently and saw what looked to him like a bird bath in the near by woods.  He brought the dogs home and went into the woods to see what shape it was in.  

Unfortunately for us, it was broken in half and had no top.  

Not only that, it had a big chunk out of the broken area so the top part would not balance on the bottom.  Undaunted and up to a challenge he came and got me to help him drag it out the woods.

Let me tell you, readers, you haven’t seen anything until you have watched us pushing a 50 pound bird bath, UP A HILL, a  heavily wooded area filled with water run off holes every where that you want to place your feet!

It was all we could do to lift it, let alone bring it up to the road. But hubbie loves to please me, so we somehow managed.

He did most of the heavy lifting. I supervised. 😉  When we got it up and back to the yard, it looked like this.

There was no way that the top would balance on the bottom because of the way that it was broken.  Fortunately for us, there was a hole right down through the center of both pieces.  

Unfortunately for us, they were different sizes and the bottom one had a lot of extra cement in it.

With a bit of chiseling and measuring, we got this project going.  We tested several supports to hold it in one piece, but ended up using a piece of 2″ x 2″ wood.

Our foster dog Layla seems totally disinterested in our recycled bird bath project! I can just see her thinking “not again!”

Since the wood was square and the holes were round and slightly smaller, Richard got out his saw and electric planer.  

We only had to sand one side, since only the bottom was too small for the wood. Lucky us!

Next step was to scrape out the extra cement from the bottom  We tried a variety of tools, but ended up using a hammer and chisel to do the job.  

The wood was measured, cut, and then was placed in the top part of the bird bath.

A quick flip of the top section and the two pieces are finally together.   The only thing left to do to finish this recycled bird bath was to mix some quick drying concrete and patch the seam so it would look more tidy.  

Who would have ever thought that this plant stand started its life laying at the bottom of a ravine in the woods, broken in half?This garden bed has several other pieces of re-purposed junk that coordinate well.   This curved piece of concrete came from the garden of a lady that my husband helped out as part of a landscaping job last summer.  

It looks great as a garden ornament with the violas planted in front of it.  

The only thing left to do now is to grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the view of my recycled bird bath from my garden bench!

Have you decorated your gardens in a trash to treasure way?  What ideas do you have to share?  I’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

To see more garden art projects, please visit my Pinterest board. And if you like recycled projects be sure to have a look at my cement blocks raised garden bed.

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