Another place to recycle plastic pots, up North

Ran into Elizabeth Hoffman of West End Florist & Garden Center in Evanston at the Independent Garden Centers Show. So I can confirm that this garden center also accepts plastic pots from gardeners for recycling. Here's the list as it stands so far:


Where Chicago-area gardeners can take garden plastic to be recycled or reused

Know of more? Send me an e-mail at bethbotts1@gmail.com and I'll check them out and add them to the list.

Sid's Greenhouses in Bolingbrook and Palos Hills (they encourage customers to take pots for reuse)
Gethsemane Garden Center, 5739 N. Clark St., Chicago
Vern Goers Greenhouse, Hinsdale (only pots from plants that they sold)
Heinz Brothers Greenhouse Garden Center, St. Charles
Platt Hill Nursery, Bloomingdale and Carpentersville (only containers with recycling numbers 2, 5 and 6)
Grand Street Gardens, 2200 W. Grand Ave., Chicago
Christy Webber Landscapes, 2900 W. Ferdinand St., Chicago, and 11900 S. Division St., Blue Island
The Natural Garden, St. Charles
West End Florist & Garden Center, Evanston

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Garden gloomarama

Another cool, gray, rainy day today. Great sleeping weather, but not so great for the garden. Here it is, almost September, and I still have more green tomatoes than red (or purple or yellow).

Not to whine too much. I've gotten some good meals in: Greek-style village salads of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, feta cheese and Kalamata olives with a fresh oregano vinaigrette; a stir-fry of pork with quartered cherry tomatoes thrown in at the last minute; plenty of tabbouleh. And it's nice when a friend comes over and you can serve a salad that came completely from the back porch -- greens, herbs, tomatoes. But it remains a disappointing tomato summer.

Last week I set up a third long self-watering box on the porch railing and sowed it with fall greens. It was way cool for August so I decided what the heck. I planted some ferny dill at one end, because I love dill, and for the rest I mixed together my remaining lettuce, spinach and chard seeds in a bowl, called it mesclun and slung them in the soil. Already have a nice crop of sprouts. I'll be eating all those greens young and small, before it gets to the point that their differing growth habits become an issue.

But then I realized that I will need more seeds for a second crop, so I went out to Mom's and begged for lettuce seeds. There is never any fear of a seed shortage at Mom's.

I have a lot of inside stuff to do today, but am hoping that I will get the chance to go out and dig a bit. I have two Pink Knock Out roses to plant. (Yes, I know it's the wrong time to plant roses, but these were hand-me-downs, and the right time to plant passalong plants is when somebody gives them to you).

And also some lily bulbs. Mom says they are Michigan lilies (Lilium michiganense). I suspect they might be Turk's cap lilies (Lilium superbum). Both are Midwestern native species, though from somewhat different habitats. Since I failed to get a picture of them when they were in bloom, I'll have to wait until next year to make the final determination.

Whatever these are, they were doing just fine in sandy soil in Indiana. I might try mixing some sand in along with compost when I plant them, to make life easier for them in my diligently amended but still basically clay soil.

In her garden they were very tall--a good 7 feet. I already have a floppy-lily problem, especially with the 'Casa Blanca' Oriental lilies (which I had forgotten I had planted until they bloomed) and some trumpet lilies.

Basically, next year, I will need to be a whole lot more conscientious about staking lilies when they are young. Almost all my lilies tend to stretch sideways for light because they are planted in too much shade. That's because my garden is pretty much all too much shade. I have come to terms with it in many respects -- I got rid of half the lawn, for example -- but I just can't stop myself from planting lilies. Later. When the sun comes out.


Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Doesn't look so green from here

Went to the Independent Garden Centers Show at Navy Pier today. This is a very good trade show (not open to the public, sorry), directed at owners of non-big-box garden centers and nurseries, where I have learned a great deal in past years about new products and especially about market research into the wants and behavior of gardeners. I attended a very useful session today, in fact, about the gardening behavior of Gen X and Gen Y couples.

But at noon, there I sat in the keynote session, listening to Patrick Moore -- yes, that Patrick Moore, once-upon-a-time Greenpeace member who now denies the effects of climate change and pooh-poohs fears of pesticides in the food chain, usually at the behest of big-bucks industrial clients.

Sure, maybe his message appeals to some people in a mom-and-pop industry where many business owners would love to be told they can just keep on doing things the way they've always done things and not worry about the price other people (or other species) may have to pay for it.

But I sat there thinking: This is the industry that generates tons of plastic waste every year and refuses to take responsibility for it (see this blog post and this one and this one). This is the industry that has had to be ordered to stop selling phosphate lawn fertilizer in Minnesota, Canada and other places because it contributes to choking algae growth that kills off other life in streams, lakes and seas. This is the industry that keeps dragging its feet on organics instead of leading the way. This is the industry that chooses Patrick Moore to set its tone.

And as I sat there, listening to Moore recite the same old discredited pseudo-"evidence" about how climate change really isn't happening, or maybe it is but it isn't that bad, or maybe it is that bad but that's really a good thing because melting glaciers and a CO2 buildup will allow more trees to grow in the Arctic, I thought:

This is the industry that wants people to call it a "green" industry, finding yet another way to shoot itself in the foot.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Porch tomatoes, slow but thirsty

At last I am getting a moderate supply of cherry tomatoes from the planters on my third- and fourth-floor porch landings. It has taken the longest time. July was so cool and rainy, I didn't get even a 'Sun Gold' until the first week in August. I've had only only one 'Black Cherry' ripen so far.
Here is it past the middle of August, and I am growing a great crop of green tomatoes.

Mostly the eating has been 'Red Robin,' and thereby hangs a sad tale. Last year I got a pair of so-called "self-watering" window boxes (a misnomer, but we'll get to that after a while) from Gardener's Supply Co. and mounted them on the third-floor porch railing, where I filled them with herbs and a couple of container-variety cherry tomato plants I picked up on impulse somewhere (don't recall exactly). I had a very satisfying harvest of flavorful little red tomatoes, and was determined to repeat the planting this year.

So back in January, I hunted up and down for seeds of 'Red Robin.' Couldn't get them from Tomato Growers Supply, where I got the 'Sun Gold' and 'Black Cherry' seeds. Searched all over the internet. Twittered my despair. Finally found them at Reimer Seeds three weeks after I got the other tomato seeds started. Was all worried I wouldn't get the 'Red Robin' seedlings to a decent size in time. This did not turn out to be a problem, since spring was so cool and due to various other disruptions I was late planting. Then, when I finally got around to it, I was digging some fresh organic fertilizer into the soil in the boxes and I found the tag from last year's plants:



Oh.


Well, but there I was with 'Red Robin' seedlings in which I had invested a good deal of time, fuss and aggravation, so I planted them in the window boxes. I had a couple of good plants extra, so I decided to experiment with making my own self-watering containers out of some good-sized plastic pots (I'll do another post about that when I get the strength) and potted them up. Where I got the notion that last year's tomatoes were 'Red Robin,' I'll never know. I must have read one too many catalogs.

The plants have been producing pretty darn well, I must say. The flavor doesn't seem to be quite up to the standard of last year's window-box tomatoes, though. I can't tell if it's because in regretful memory I have romanticized the flavor of the 'Tiny Tims,' or if there has just not been enough sun to fully develop the flavor of the tomatoes. Or maybe it's because of the growth habit.

'Red Robin,' being bred for container growing, is very dense, as you can see in the top photo. The intervals between the leaves and stems are very short. The plants aren't a foot high, though they trail a bit over the sides of the containers. And a lot of the fruit is hidden deep within the thick foliage. To harvest, I have to comb through the leaves as if I were checking a dog's fur for ticks or a kid's hair for head lice.

My theory is that the fruit is so shaded by the dense leaves that it just doesn't get enough sunlight to fully develop the sugars that are needed for a really flavorful tomato. But that might not be true in a sunny summer. Here's what I do know: Imperfect though they may be, my four 'Red Robin' plants are producing tomatoes a far sight more flavorful than anything you can buy in a store.

They don't come cheap, though. As a friend said the other day, "Low-maintenance tomatoes don't exist." Mainly it's the watering.

All my tomatoes--the four 'Red Robin,' one 'Sun Gold,' two 'Black Cherry' and one 'Bonito Ojo'--are in self watering containers.

Of course "self-watering" containers don't really water themselves; they have a reservoir at the bottom that you fill with water, so the soil can wick up through a soil full of organic matter to provide the roots of the plants with as much water as they need. The Earth Box is another variation on the theme, but my big ones aren't Earth Boxes. I chose the Organic Tomato Success Kit from Gardener's Supply Co. because I like its sturdy cages better than the staking system provided with the Earth Box, and boy, was I right about that. The tradeoff is that the Tomato Success Kit doesn't come with the tight-fitting black plastic mulch cover that stretches over the Earth Box; it just has a sheet of red plastic mulch that sort of lies over the top of the soil, and this is a defect. It lets a lot of water evaporate from the soil.

Some of the little plants are in the long self-watering window boxes from Gardener's Supply, sharing the space with a lot of herbs. Another couple are in those do-it-yourself self-watering containers that I scrounged up from stuff I had on hand. I've also got some greens growing in pots that I converted to self-watering using a gizmo Gardener's Supply sells for the purpose.

During June and even July, me and all the tomatoes were cruising. With all the rain and coolth, it was no trouble to keep the reservoirs filled with water (although the water level indicators vary widely on these devices and some work better than others). I'd fill them up every three or four days.

Once it hit August and got hot and dry, though, and the big indeterminate tomatoes started burgeoning out of their cages, they became thirsty as camels at the oasis. I'm watering those things every day. Now, without the self-watering containers I'd probably be watering three times a day, like I did with those idiotic upside-down tomato planters I tried last year. But clearly my fantasies of going away for a week while the tomatoes took care of themselves were fantasies indeed.


The big tomatoes just have so many thirsty roots now. And they have a lot of leaf surface.
Plants cool themselves by letting water evaporate through holes in their leaves. That's how they create the water pressure that keeps them upright and gives structure to their stems and leaves, like a fire hose that plumps up when the hydrant is turned on. It's that water pressure that moves nutrients into the leaves and fruits. Plants also need water for photosynthesis, to create the food they break down for energy to make leaves, stems and fruits.

More leaves, more evaporation. More heat, more evaporation. More evaporation, more exercise I get hauling watering cans from the kitchen sink. And all for, mostly, green tomatoes so far.

The 'Red Robins' are not so thirsty because they have far fewer leaves. And they are giving me edible tomatoes. So I forgive them, grudgingly, for not being 'Tiny Tims.'

Is "self-watering" a snare and a delusion? Not entirely. It reduces watering. It doesn't eliminate it. But I wish that the terminology was different. I wished they had started out calling these things "reduced-watering," or something, and not encouraged foolish fantasies of low-maintenance tomatoes. And one overlooked benefit of these systems is that they have an overflow for the reservoir, so you can't overwater the plants, which can kill them as effectively as underwatering.

I don't even the slightest regret my porch tomatoes, despite the expense (no, we will not discuss the expense, because I don't care to think about it). But next summer, when it might be far hotter, I will be mentally prepared for all the water hauling.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Link to podcast of radio show about plastic pots

is here. Featuring me, of course. And a fascinating discussion about the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District's resistance to disinfecting sewage effluent before dumping it into the Chicago River. And a discussion of edible mushrooms with fungi guy Greg Mueller (who will be speaking and signing copies of his and Joe Mcfarland's immortal "Edible Wild Mushrooms of Illinois & Surrounding States: A Field-to-Kitchen Guide" on Tuesday, Sept. 8, at the North Park Village Nature Center). Oh, and Mike Nowak. It's his show.

Incidentally, fans of Mike's gardening-and-greening show should note that as of Aug. 23 it's moving to the morning. It will be on from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. every Sunday on WCPT, 820-AM in Chicago. So you can listen with one ear while leafing through the paper and still have time to go out and get some gardening done.

Summer is on the wane

The fronds of the ostrich ferns whose fiddleheads were so pretty in spring are drying and crispy. The broad leaves of hostas and wild ginger are riddled with slug holes. The impatiens in the pots are stalky. All the lily petals have fallen. The first Japanese anemones are opening up. There's no denying it: Summer's end is in sight.

It hardly seems to me like there's been a summer. Partly, I guess, it's because we didn't have the usual steamy July (not that I'm complaining). But partly because I've been so busy being pulled in so many unexpected directions that I haven't spent nearly as much time in the garden this year as I did when I was commuting to an office every weekday. When I went out to patrol for dry pots this morning I realized I hadn't visited my plants since last week.

I've spent my whole summer in front of a computer screen or in a car or at a conference or a class. Mostly in front of a computer screen.

So, a vow: I will be in the garden every day until the end. Maybe for 10 minutes to patrol for dry pots, maybe for 15 minutes to read what's left of the paper, maybe for five hours to weed and primp and dig until my back aches.

I'll find time to grub all the mature compost out of the bins and spread it on the lawn, to make room in the bins for the leaves that will be falling before we know it.

I'll take lots of cuttings. I had great success this year filling spots and pots with foliage plants that I cloned in large numbers from last fall's cutting -- two or three kinds of coleus, Swedish ivy, a big pot of purple heart vine in the border, fuzzy silver plectranthus planted in the front bed contrasting beautifully with violet phlox. A lot of oomph for free.



I don't have much suitable window space, but I'm going to figure out how to arrange it to raise more cuttings more efficiently this winter.

I've already sowed a new crop of lettuce in the 4th-floor-porch pots and I'm about to sow another in a box on the porch railing. If my fall greens do as well as my spring greens did, I'll be in clover.

Somebody sent me a bunch of fescue grass seed to try out, and it will be time to seed or overseed in a couple of weeks. But the lawn has stayed so lush this summer (with no watering whatsoever) that I don't really have any bad patches to fill.

Oh, I'll order bulbs. I'll try and find pictures from spring to help me plan. But I'll probably order too much of too many kinds of bulbs and plant them all in the wrong places, so in May I'll have congested mobs some places and blank spots a few feet away. It's a tradition. Why stop now?

The point is: I'm going to garden. From now on. Nothing will stop me except a hard frost. And then I'll prune.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Another place to drop off plastic pots

Got this email from Pat Hollingsworth at The Natural Garden in St. Charles:

Thanks for the great article on recycling. Last spring at The Natural Garden we begin our own “ Recycling Center.” It is located across from the Herb House. . . It’s pretty impressive as it explains exactly what we can recycle here and where to deposit each type of container. We constructed it from old pallets and wooden shipping crates. For every 10 pots our customers brought in we gave them a free native plant. Customers were less interested in the freebee, but were mostly grateful they had a place to drop the pots off.

I've added The Natural Garden to the list of places to recycle plastic pots in this post.

I've been told that Blogger is making it difficult to comment on this blog. I'm sorry. I'll debug the situation as soon as I have the time, but in the meantime anybody wanting to communicate with me can send an email to bethbotts1@gmail.com.

Getting ready to leave for the radio studio--WCPT, 820-AM, noon to 2 p.m. today, Mike Nowak gardening-and-greening show. Paddlers talk about Chicago River pollution, we talk about plastic pots, Greg Meuller talks about backyard mushrooms.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Plastic collection a success at the botanic garden

I hear from Gloria Ciaccio, head of PR at the Chicago Botanic Garden, that when the garden held a collection weekend for garden plastics in June they collected 20 Gaylords of pots. (A "Gaylord"is a kind of box, sized to fit a shipping pallet. Each Gaylord--it's a brand name, I gather--represents 1.75 cubic yards and 47.250 cubic feet, Gloria is told by Mel Huwe, general manager of grounds services and event support at the garden, and we have no choice but to believe him because until now we had never heard of a Gaylord.)

The garden was surprised by the response and the collection event was such a success that the garden plans to do it again in early June of next year, Gloria says.

A reminder: I'll be on Mike Nowak's radio show tomorrow (Sunday) discussing the plastics issue from noon to 2 p.m. on WCPT, 820-AM.

Here's a link to a podcast of the last time I was on the show a couple of weeks ago. We were talking with marcus de la fleur about his serial efforts to retrofit homes and gardens to sustainably collect and manage stormwater.

Also on the agenda: talk about pollution in the Chicago River and Greg Mueller, vice president for science and academic programs at the Chicago Botanic Garden and, crucially, mushroom maven. He will talk about the book he co-authored on Illinois mushrooms that I discussed in this blog post.

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

All contents of this post are copyright Beth Botts. Feel free to link or share a brief excerpt with a link, but please do not reproduce photos or any other part of this blog without my express permission.

Garden plastics: Signs of hope, but a long way to go

(Plastic pots collected by Moore Landscapes Inc. in Northbrook for recycling. Photo from Linda Kiscellus, Moore Landscapes)
With planting mostly over until the chrysanthemums come along, we have time to contemplate a perennial problem: All the plastic pots and other plastic waste that come from gardening.

Even in a bad economic year, I'm glad to report, some people in the local horticulture scene are trying to tackle that problem. And a big problem it is.

In 2007 and 2008, I wrote a couple of stories in the Chicago Tribune about the fact that the gardening industry -- not just the garden centers and big-box stores we deal with, but all the growers, breeders, fertilizer companies, mulch producers, landscapers, everybody in the behind-the-scenes supply chain -- depend entirely on plastic -- some 320 million pounds of plastic a year, according to a 2004 estimate from the Penn State University College of Agricultural Sciences in University Park, Pa. (I couldn't find a more recent estimate, but I doubt it's gone down.) And very little of that is recycled.

Why? Lots of reasons. It doesn't fit into municipal recycling programs because of the wide variety of shapes, sizes and materials used in garden plastic. And the horticulture industry has historically done practically nothing to take responsibility for the waste it produces.

Yet since we gardeners are the customers -- the people whose dollar all those businesses are chasing, the people whose desire for color and bloom and flavor fuels the whole industry, the people who buy all these plants and potions -- we certainly share the responsibility for sending all that plastic to the landfill.

It's not just the pots that we see piled in our garages and basements. A plant may have been transplanted two or three times as it grows before we buy it, and every stage of growth takes place in plastic. A 1-gallon perennial may have required two or three or four pieces of plastic before it reaches a garden. Even a six-pack of annuals can involve at least three pieces of plastic: a plug tray in which the seeds were started, the cell packs the sprouts were transplanted into and the carrier in which the cell packs were carried to the garden center.

Those stories I wrote created some fuss and prompted contributed, I've been told, to some self-examination in the horticulture industry (you can find them on the Chicago Tribune web site here and here). One of them was awarded the Gold Award, top prize from the Garden Writers Association.

(Now I'm going to write a lot about the horticultural industry. But I promise that at the end there will be a list of the places I know of where a Chicago-area gardener can take surplus plastic pots and containers to be reused or recycled.)

Last summer, I thought I was beginning to see progress on the plastic front. Stratospheric oil prices had pushed the price of plastic resin -- which is derived from oil and natural gas -- way up, which made recycled plastic more valuable in places like China that were still cranking out consumer goods to sell back to us.

At least some growers, nursery owners, garden centers and other business people were properly embarrassed to be calling themselves a "green industry" when their whole business depended on plastic that wasn't recycled. Although horticulture is overall a conservative industry, reluctant to change, a few people in it are real leaders and, despite real obstacles, were determined to tackle the problem.

Then came the recession. Americans abruptly stopped buying plastic stuff. The price of oil fell, and with it the value of recycled plastic resin. Brokers who had been willing to buy plastic resin for the China market suddenly weren't. Several pot-recycling initiatives I'd been told about fell through.

But even in a time of scary uncertainty, a few kept pushing. Midwest Groundcovers, a major wholesale grower in St. Charles, started a program to collect pots from its nursery and landscape customers for recycling. Some landscapers started finding a way to recycle the many plants they install in commercial and residential landscapes. Some garden centers collected pots, all the time or on designated days (and often found it boosted their foot traffic and sales). Many of those pots went to the growers who supply the retailers. So a few pots were starting to find their way back up the production and distribution chain they had come down with plants in them.

Master Gardeners in McClean County, down near Bloomington, started a collection program and made it work. The Missouri Botanic Garden, pioneers of plastic pot recycling, collected more pots than ever in the St. Louis area, and the Chicago Botanic Garden collected pots for recycling one weekend in June in Glencoe. I spoke about the plastics issue to the Garden Club of Evanston and at the 2009 Chicago Flower & Garden Show in March.

A few weeks later, Mike Nowak, host of a gardening-and-greening show on WCPT (820 AM), founder of the Midwest Ecological Landscaping Association and vice president of the Chicago Recycling Coalition, brought together a group of enlightened growers, garden center and landscaping business owners and executives of the Illinois Green Industry Association, the biggest trade association in this state, to try and get a coordinated effort started in the Chicago area this year, with at least one collection day for pots from businesses and gardeners.

It fell through. The logistics didn't work out, the IGIA told Mike. There wasn't enough interest from businesses. In this slow-to-change industry in a scary, uncertain time, apparently not enough people saw the urgency of moving on an environmental problem.

It was a disappointment. But some people have pushed ahead on their own.

Christy Webber Landscapes, a big landscape contractor, not only recycles pots from their own installations but decided to accept them for recycling from gardeners, both at their yards and at their newly purchased garden center, Grand Street Gardens.

Moore Landscapes, another big landscape contractor, started collecting, cleaning and sorting grower pots to try and recycle them, shipping many of them back to Midwest Groundcovers. But they came up against one of the obstacles: As many as a third of the polystyrene containers--such as cell packs and trays -- aren't stamped with the little triangle that indicates that a container is recyclable and what it is made of, according to purchasing manager Linda Kiscellus.

Yet any horticultural plastic can be recycled, triangle or not, according to Nathan Diller, recycling manager for East Jordan Plastics in Michigan. His family's company (which started out three generations ago making the wooden flats in which plants used to be grown and now makes all kinds of pots, flats and other horticultural containers) recently bought a 130,000-square-foot recycling factory in South Haven, Michigan, that is dedicated entirely to recycling garden plastics. And they can tell well enough what a flat or cellpack is made of even if it was made from a mold too old to have the recycling triangle, he said.

So far, most of the plastic they collect is from Michigan growers, Diller said, but they would love to gather in plastic from the Chicago area, if they can get it in properly sorted and consolidated into large enough quantities to be worth trucking a couple of hours up I-94.

Already, the company recycles plastic from some Home Depot and Meijier stores in the Chicago area and elsewhere that have started pilot programs to accept plastic from retail customers, I'm told. (I haven't been able to confirm this, so don't take pots to your local Home Depot or Meijier without calling ahead to make sure that store is participating in the program.)

All the plastic recycled at East Jordan's facility, Diller says, will be made into more horticultural containers -- closed-loop recycling that is a far sight better, it seems to me, than shipping resin to China to be made into who knows what.

One company that brings plastic to East Jordan is Luurtsema Sales, a big grower based in Jension, Michigan. Luurtsema matters to us here because they supply plants to all those tents in Chicago-area Jewel supermarket parking lots (as well as many independent garden centers and other retailers).

For two years, Luurtsema has been gathering up pots at those Jewel tents and other retailers in Chicago, Michigan and elsewhere in the Midwest. In 2008, they collected about 10.5 tons, according to Rob Arnold of Luurtsema. (Included in that total was a couple of hundred pots, flats and cell packs from my own basement, which I toted over to my local Jewel after I noticed a tattered little flyer in the tent offering to take them off my hands.)

This year, after doing some more sophisticated promotion (better signs, I noticed), Luurtsema collected about 22 tons, more than double the previous year's crop. About 60 percent of that will be reused in Luurtsema's own operations and the other 40 percent goes to East Jordan to be recycled.

There are other efforts underway around the area, though it's not easy. Growers, landscapers and retailers that want to make progress are up against complexities -- the lack of standardization in plastic materials and sizes, the difficulty of collecting the plastic from many nurseries and retailers in one place in truckload quantities, the difficulty of cleaning soil from the pots (that takes a lot of water), the fact that stacking and rinsing all those containers requires labor that is hard to pay for when times are tough, fears about reusing pots that aren't completely sterile in greenhouses where a few bacteria or fungus spores can spread a disease like wildfire. Business owners can come up with a lot of reasons why this is difficult.

One big difficulty, it seems to me, is a lack of coordination and information. I was the one who told Kiscellus about the existence of the East Jordan facility. Why should a blogger have to be the one to tell her? Why isn't this information coursing through the Illinois green industry?

But bottom line: It is possible. The technology exists to recycle garden plastic. These early experiments show that gardeners are willing. What is required is the will on the industry's part to solve the problems and make it happen. The green industry can be greener if everyone in it will step up and take responsibility for being greener.

Sure, recycling plastic is not the ultimate answer to a sustainable gardening future. In the long run, like all of us, the industry needs to use less plastic in the first place. In the long run, they need to reduce the amount of plastic in each pot, to streamline production of plants so fewer pots are needed, to find a workable replacement for plastic that is biodegradable. People are working on all those problems. But in the meantime, simply recycling pots, flats, cell packs and plug trays is an essential first step.

So what should a gardener do? We can reduce our own use of plastic by growing plants from seed, starting seeds in reused or recyclable containers and acquiring plants by swapping with our friends and neighbors instead of buying them. We can plant long-lived plants, such as native perennials, that need to be replaced less often, requiring fewer pots (and saving money and effort, I might add). We can remember that every time we buy a plant, we are buying not one plastic pot but several, and think about what's going to happen to the pot the plant came in.

But it isn't realistic -- nor is it desirable -- for us totally give up buying plants in pots. We don't want our favorite garden centers and the growers that supply them to go out of business for lack of customers. And without the excitement of trying new plants and of making our garden visions come alive with new plantings, much of the fun would go out of our gardening. Some of us wouldn't be able to grow our favorite vegetables and herbs if we couldn't buy them in pots.

But we have a choice about where we buy those plants. We can decide what kind of people and what kind of companies we want to buy them from.

So let's own up to our part in the plastic waste problem and demand that the people who do business with us own up to theirs. Let's collect our pots and take them to be recycled. If that isn't convenient, let's demand that garden businesses make it convenient. Let's reward the forward-thinking retailers and landscapers who have stepped up with our gardening dollars. Let's hold this "green industry" accountable for constantly moving toward becoming as green as it says it is.

It's our buck they are all chasing. That gives us leverage. Let's use it.

I'll be on Mike Nowak's radio show Sunday, Aug. 9, and we'll be discussing this issue further. So tune in: noon to 2 p.m., WCPT, 820-AM. I also will be speaking on this topic on Oct. 19 at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

Now, the list:

Where Chicago-area gardeners can take garden plastic to be recycled or reused

These are the ones I have confirmed as of July 30. Know of more? Send me an e-mail at bethbotts1@gmail.com and I'll check them out and add them to the list.

Sid's Greenhouses in Bolingbrook and Palos Hills (they encourage customers to take post for reuse)
Gethsemane Garden Center, 5739 N. Clark St., Chicago
Vern Goers Greenhouse, Hinsdale (only pots from plants that they sold)
Heinz Brothers Greenhouse Garden Center, St. Charles
Platt Hill Nursery, Bloomingdale and Carpentersville (only containers with recycling numbers 2, 5 and 6)
Grand Street Gardens, 2200 W. Grand Ave., Chicago
Christy Webber Landscapes, 2900 W. Ferdinand St., Chicago, and 11900 S. Division St., Blue Island
The Natural Garden, St. Charles

Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

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