A Cheap Alternative to Coconut Liners

Beautiful new planter with coconut liner

I have a few of those beautiful metal planters that came with a coconut liner when I bought them.

The coconut liner always looks so beautiful when you first get the planter and plant stuff in it.

But after a season or two, it looks dingy and gray.

Or it gets torn apart by the birds to use for building their nests.

Yuck!

Coconut liner faded and torn apart by birds

You can buy fresh coconut liner every spring, but that gets to be pretty expensive.

I wanted to try to figure out something to replace the coconut liners, that wouldn't cost me an arm and a leg.

So I racked my brain and pondered over it for a few weeks. I tried to find pots in the garage that would fit into the metal baskets. But no luck there, the ones I found didn't match each other let alone fit. I figured it would look tacky even if they did fit.

Use landscaping fabric for liner

While digging in the garage for pots, I came across a bunch of leftover landscape fabric just collecting dust.

Aha!

I figured I would try using that as a liner for my metal planters this year.

This option won't cost me a cent, and I think it'll look pretty nice.

Since the fabric isn't stiff like coconut liners are, it was a bit more difficult task to get the liner looking good.

Cut off extra fabric around top

It took some trial and error to figure out how to get the liner to stay in the basket so the dirt wouldn't spill out.

I decided to use a thin metal wire to attach the fabric to the metal planter baskets.

I poked the metal wire through the liner and wrapped it around the top of the metal of the basket, filling the liner with dirt as I went.

I also worked to bunch and straighten the liner as I went around each basket so the liner wouldn't bunch up in one spot.

Once the fabric was attached to the wire basket all the way around, I trimmed off the extra fabric so it's level with the top of the metal basket.

Planter looking new again!

Once I filled the baskets with dirt, the liner took shape and I think it turned out great.

We'll see how it holds up, I suspect the landscaping fabric will last longer than the coconut liner.

It's a bit late for planting annuals, so I decided to fill my planter with perennial succulents.

It should fill in pretty good by the end of the summer.

I'm going to try to overwinter it in the garage and see if the plants will survive. If they do, this will be beautiful next summer!!

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