Gardener Turns Plastic Nursery Pots Into A Home For Backyard Butterflies

Throwing away old nursery pots feels wasteful. Those black plastic containers cannot be recycled, and used pots end up cluttering your gardening supplies. Luckily, there's an easy DIY project to reuse these plant pots and create a fun garden feature. In a YouTube clip posted by Cityline, Carson Arthur, a gardening expert, showed how nursery pots can be transformed into butterfly houses with the addition of a wood round. When there are powerful winds or rainy weather, butterflies need a safe place to shelter from the storm.

This genius way to reuse old plastic pots around the garden only requires a piece of wood, a drill, and a saw to make. Arthur upgraded the old plastic pot into a shelter where butterflies can stop for a rest by plugging the top with wood and creating doorways for the stunning pollinators. To make your house even more attractive to butterflies, you'll also need some bark or twigs from nearby trees.

Online, there are lots of instructions for building wooden butterfly houses, and some garden centers sell them. But instead of a complex woodworking project, this trick offers a quicker and more affordable option for constructing a butterfly shelter. Arthur claimed that his repurposed nursery pots quickly became home to moths. While there's debate about whether butterflies will actually use or live in structures like these, this DIY adds a unique decoration to your yard that could prove beneficial to these vital insects. While these butterfly houses aren't built to last forever, Arthur suggested they'll hold up for a couple of seasons.

In order to get the perfect size wooden round for the nursery pot, Arthur turned the plastic container upside down and set it on the wood. After tracing the circumference of the pot's opening, the gardener cut the circle from the wood. Then, he cut out parallel slots as doors for the butterflies.

To create openings that will make your house attractive to butterflies, use a ½ inch bit to drill a hole where you want the top and bottom of each slot. Each opening should be a few inches long. Cut out the space between the drilled holes with a jigsaw. While the gardener kept his doors all in a row, you could stagger them for a different look. If you'd like, paint the outside of the wood and plastic with bright, fun colors.

Give the butterflies a bench to sit on by placing pieces of bark or branches inside the sideways nursery pot. Then, close the house by pushing the piece of wood into the plastic container. Since it was cut to size, it should fit snug in the top of the pot. To attract butterflies to your butterfly house, situate it in the sun near flowers that produce nectar and away from strong winds. Hang the upcycled pot from a fence post or another existing structure four to six feet from the ground. If you have tons of containers, crafting homes for bees is another way to repurpose empty nursery pots to fill your garden with pollinators.