My dad and I planted a garden last weekend. I am totally pumped for fresh fruits, veggies and herbs!
We planted strawberries, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, garlic, and several herbs.
I’ve noticed a fun trend of clever garden markers circulating around on the interwebs. Here’s a collection of inexpensive and DIY garden markers. I need to make some, especially for my herb garden since I have no idea what it what anymore. It’s hard to tell dirt apart from dirt!
1. Vintage Silverware
I have to give a shout out to one of my favorite Esty shops/websites, Monkeys Always Look. I stumbled upon this shop on Etsy when I was shopping for wedding gifts for my parents. Allison makes awesome jewelry, so I had her customize three sterling silver rings for my three moms with words that describe them. My mom’s word was “inspirational,” my step mom’s word was “amazing,” and my mother-in-law’s word was “compassionate.” They loved their gifts.
She also sells vintage silverware garden markers! In fact, I just bought my dad a set of three for his birthday. Check these bad boys out:
Too cool, right? You can also make these yourself if you have all the right tools and a lot of old silverware! Here’s a metal stamping tutorial from Happy Hour Projects I found online a while ago. Someday I’ll try this out… for now, I’m glad to have Allison as my hookup!
2. Painted Stones
Thanks to my older sister for pinning this cool idea on Pinterest the other day. Lu Bird Baby created garden markers out of stones by painting the stones with the name and picture of the herb. If you have an abundance of rocks outside your home, this could be a super inexpensive way to create garden markers.
3. Twigs
These twigs-turned-garden-markers are way cool. They are created out of Manitoba Maple twigs and are available on Etsy from noJOisaverage. These markers are even safe for composting! Hop on over and check out Jo’s shop to learn more about these fun creations.
4. Corks
I should totally make these with all of my leftover wine corks from our wedding. Check out the tutorial on these DIY cork garden markers from My Chic Life. They are too stinking cute!
5. Aluminum Tape
Aunt Peaches does a fun tutorial on making these garden markers from Aluminum Duct Tape and plastic knives. How clever!
6. Wooden spoons
Don’t have any vintage silverware around? No problem! Find yourself a few wooden spoons to create you own markers. Little Green Fingers found this set at a dollar store! It would be cute to paint these like the stones, too!
7. Clothespins
From Glue and Glitter, here’s a great way to make garden markers. All you need are clothespins, skewers and a permanent marker.
8. Chalkboard markers
I really like everyone’s creative use of chalkboard paint these days. Crate and Barrel hopped on that train, creating chalkboard garden markers! Grab a little chalkboard paint and a few pieces of wood — popsicle sticks, even — and make these yourself! But be careful, not quite sure what would happen to your markers after you water your garden!
9. Popsicle sticks
Last, but certainly not least, save up your popsicle sticks to create your own garden markers. Check out One Artsy Mama‘s DIY tutorial on this project. These are too cute and look extra sturdy since they have two stakes to in the ground. If you have a rowdy dog who runs by your garden every day, that might sound as good to you as it sounds to me!
Did I miss any fun ideas?! I’m sure I did. If you have a fun garden marker tutorial, you should totally share it with me! I’d love to see what you come up with. I’ll share mine once I figure out what I am gonna do 🙂
A Smith of All Trades 
Love those stones! Maybe if you can’t pain them, you could like decoupage pictures onto them? And varnish them or something?
I got pieces of slate for my kitchen this weekend. $1 each- And I’m gonna use them for labeling baskets and crap. I bet they’d be cute too if the chalk doesn’t wash off.
love the stone idea. with decoupage I have a HUGE daylily garden and think that would be cool to put a picture of the plant on each marker.
I like the wooden spoon idea!
Hi there, found you on craft gawker. This is a great round up but I would really love it if there were links to the original creators/authors/photographers of these projects so I can check them out. I can imagine the artists would also only want their projects shared if they get credit for them.
You are totally right. I gave credit in a few links throughout the post (they are black and a little hard to see now that I’m looking for them!). Unfortunately I found a bunch on these on either other round-ups (and couldn’t find the original blog) or on Pinterest (which doesn’t always link back).
I was actually very nervous about submitting this post to CG because the photo I submitted wasn’t mine. I was happy that they gave the Etsy shop credit in the post.
Popsicle stick idea is robust yet pretty. Thank You.
Have some chalkboard markers in my garden & they’ll need paint to read the writing after a rain or watering. But they’re so darn cute I couldn’t resist! Found mine at the Dollar Spot at Target.
Really!!?? That’s awesome. I will totally be checking for them next time I’m at Target!
I wonder if a quick wrap with some clear packaging tape would keep the chalk intact.
I was surfing craftgawker when I came across the sticks and went “Oh, Jo’s sticks!”. I was a little sad when I realized it linked to a diy post by someone who isn’t Jo. Perhaps next time, submit your own photos to other websites rather than someone else’s work? (or at least drop them a note and ask permission. )
Thanks for the feedback! I did link to Jo’s site in the post (although not by name) and Craftgawker did credit his photos, but I 100 percent see where you are coming from. I’ll make an update to the post so Jo get’s the credit he deserves. Thanks again for pointing this out!!
Hey, noJOisaverage here… each picture can be linked back to the creator… if you select the picture and then choose the link button and paste the URL of the item into the slot provided. Thank you for your appreciation of my craft.
it is a simple craft, but that’s not to say it’s not difficult, you have to find the right twigs, whittle them down nicely and have an ink that will not run. for some of the others you featured you may need expensive tools, letter stamping on metal at the lowest you are looking at a $40 investment… and as far as mine go, my hands are hurting from making my latest 20 markers 🙂
By all means, DIY! I encourage you, but it’s not always as easy as it seems, perhaps for your next DIY … you could DIY… and show us YOUR process… or if you want to feature me in another DIY you could ask me for mine 🙂 thanks for your appreciation.
Hi Jo! First of all, Blogger Fail. As someone who has only been doing this for a couple of months, I don’t know all of the rules and whatnot of blogging. I tried to give credit throughout the post, but obviously I didn’t do an adequate job. I think we can both agree that my intent was not to offend anyone (if I was going to offend people, I certainly wouldn’t be writing about creative garden markers!). I in no way meant to take credit for any the ideas in the roundup, rather to say I thought they are all way cool.
Thank you for your feedback on my post — I am going to update my post today so your Etsy shop is named instead of just linked to, and so the photo links back to your Etsy site as well. I thought by copying the image URL and inserting it into the post in that manner linked the photo back to your shop, but I went back and checked and that’s not the case. I’ll also see if I can give credit to the rest of the images (although I explained a few comments ago that I found most of these ideas on Pinterest and other roundups, so credit isn’t always easy to give).
And as far as saying your twigs are easy to make… well that was just silly. I would be pissed if someone said that about some of the things I do, so I certainly shouldn’t have said it about your garden markers. In fact I have a post scheduled for Thursday that looks super easy to do, and the concept isn’t hard, but just like your markers…. my fingers were aching when I was finished. For this, I sincerely apologize.
Last, but certainly not least (as I ramble on like none other), if you ever want to do a Twig Garden Marker DIY, I am happy to have you as a guest poster 🙂
Thanks for being kind in your feedback. I really appreciate it.
The post is updated, links, text, photos and all! It took some hunting (silly Pinterest linking back to nothing!), but I found most of the original sources for these ideas. I also removed the ones I couldn’t find. Hopefully you are OK with how I showed off your cool idea. If not, let me know and I’m happy to update again!
Thank you very much smith for your humble apologies and changing your blog. We all are learning as we go aren’t we 🙂
I was not offended at all, just… giving direction and a heads up.
Cheers!
keep on bloggin’
Jo