Wine Bottle Raised Beds

First - start collecting all the empty wine bottles you can. Make friends like I did with people who drink and even wineries close by. One 4ft by 6ft raised bed takes about 300 wine bottles to make. So, depending on how many beds you plan to make - you will be collecting a lot of bottles.

300 +/- wine bottles (with or without lables.)

3 - 6 tubes of Liquid nails (similar to caulk in a tube)

1 Caulking gun

Soil to fill raised bed

Looking at the image with the full bed and the started bed - you will start you bed with one layer of bottles to outline your bed. As you lay your bottles down, you may need to glue some together according to the lay of the land - litterally. In my case I had some uneven land - so I glued two or three together every so often, but not every bottle.

Then you will see the inside corner in the second image on how high I built by "walls" of bottles. I wanted to make sure there was a good depth of soil so I could grow things like garlic and potatoes as well as shallower vegitables. In the end, I had 4 layers of bottles, thus the need for so many.

Before filling the "wine bottle bed" with soil - I'd suggest taking cardboard and fitting it to the corners like you see in the pictures above. By doing this before the soil goes in, you will notice the soil staying IN the box rather than flowing OUT the corners when you water your plants.

Then fill the beds with your choice of soil. You may consider filling with a combination of compost, and other amendments for better growing, rather than plain potting soil. As you see in the picture, I filled mine pretty full since I knew the soil would settle when wet.

In the end - I called these my "Drunken Tomato Boxes" since my tomatoes grew so well in these. Plus my garlic did rather well over the winter, since the glass was able to heat the soil and help the roots feel good.