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Our First Egg!

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Upcycling Old Mattresses & Box Springs

When we decided to paint our house and remove/redo the front garden path, we also had an old box spring sitting around from our outdoor bed. Yes, we have an outdoor double bed on a shaded & covered deck, complete with fan. It's a must, really!


We didn't want to pay to dump it at the time, so I decided to experiment & I stripped it apart. It was/is a really old box spring, from the time when they actually contained springs! We stripped the cloth cover off, detached the wooded slatted platform (and left on the double bed as the new box spring of sorts), and removed the connected inner springs. Then we spray painted the inner springs yellow, along with another part that I am fairly vague about what to call. It is sort of a wire trellis sheet thingee.


We hung the new trellises the south-facing wall of our house in the sun. It gets HOT along this wall, and I planted some grape vines along it. The inner spring mattress-turned trellis-gets the leaves & grapes off the wall some, allowing them more space to grow & support. It allows them to not fry in summer. The grape vines will eventually alleviate all the glare from the wall off the other plants below, allowing them not to fry as well. When fully "in leaf" the vines did their job last year, and the plants in the bed below grew HUGE!


We have an experiment next to the inner spring trellis, in which I wired my own trellis (created with wire & hooks) right next to the siding. The grape vine there is significantly smaller in size this year, but was not when it was planted last year. I think the grapes like the additional air space between the wall & plant that the inner spring trellis provides. As you can see, we had no problems with the heat from the wall scorching our plants. You can see the trellis to the right along the wall (more pics soon). In fact, we had to beat a path to the front door at times....







1 comment:

  1. I also had a almost 12 years old low profile box spring, I used it as my pets bed...I have almost 8 dogs.

    Thanks for sharing your post.

    ReplyDelete