All the Ways to Repurpose an Old Garden Hose (Instead of Throwing It Away)
Preparing your gardening tools for summer sometimes involves replacing a hose that’s frozen and cracked over the winter or has leaked. If you have an old hose that needs to be replaced, don’t just throw it away – there are many uses for hose material besides carrying water. Here are a few ways you can recycle your hose to help take care of other things around the house and garden, keep material out of the landfill, and make housework easier.
Protect your blades
Just because a hose can no longer carry water doesn’t mean it’s useless. One way to repurpose an old hose is to use it as a saw guard (and protect your fingers from sharp edges). To use the hose as a blade guard, simply cut a piece to the length of the blade you want to use it on (or around the circumference as it works for saw blades too) and cut the hose on one side. Slide the hose over the edge of the blade to keep your teeth sharp and your fingers safe.
Make sure the hose and saw are dry before using the blade guard as moisture can cause the blades to rust. Preventing them from rubbing against other tools, especially metal ones, will help your saw blades last longer.
Make a bucket handle
By cutting a slot in an old hose, you can also get a bucket handle that won’t hurt your fingers. When you’re carrying water or paint around in a five-gallon bucket, the metal handle can dig into the inside of your fingers and make any housework more uncomfortable than it needs to be. If you put a piece of hose on the bucket handle, it will increase in diameter, distributing the force of the handle on the fingers and adding some cushioning. The great thing about this trick is that you can save the handle and use it on any handle that digs into your fingers, making this a reusable cycle.
Take care of tiny fingers
If you have a swing, you can use a piece of hose to keep children’s fingers from getting caught in the chains. If the chain is small enough, you can thread it through the hose or cut a slit in the hose and wrap it around the chain. An added bonus is that the chains do not twist or tangle, making the swing safer for toddlers. You can also use a long hose to protect any chain and keep it from tangling. For example, if you have a driveway access chain, this method might work for that as well.
Support the seedling
Another great way to repurpose an old hose is to use it in place of rope or twine to support a seedling. Using anything that can cause friction or scarring on the bark of a young tree can do more harm than good. Narrow materials such as garden twine or synthetic rope can cut into the tree’s bark or cause friction in the wind, wearing down the bark and damaging the tree. Using a rubber hose to attach the seedling to the stakes will allow it to move in the wind without damaging the young tree because it stretches a little and has a larger diameter than most garden twine. This will also allow the stem of the seedling to expand as it grows without clogging the tree or scarring the bark.
Make your own soak hose
You can also use the water transfer hose for other purposes. If your hose has a few leaks, you can turn it into a soak hose for watering garden beds at ground level. Make punctures on the surface of the hose with a nail or awl, attach it to the end of a regular watering hose, place it on the bed and turn the water on to a minimum.
This will allow water to seep into the soil without as much evaporation as when watering from above, and also allows water to enter the soil where the roots need it without wetting the leaves of your plants, helping to prevent mold and mildew by keeping the foliage dry.