Turn Your Milk Jug into Garden Shovel

This week’s life hack does exactly what the title implies. You can turn a milk jug into a garden shovel. How? Here’s how!

Let me start off with a disclaimer. You may have varying degrees of success with this life hack. Milk jugs come in many shapes and sizes. Not all of them will be able to be cut into a perfect garden spade. I only personally tested this with a medium-sized milk jug that I bought at Jewel Osco. I have no idea if it would work on large milk jugs or containers from different grocery stores. I’m not made of cash. I only bought the one jug. If you would like to test it out with other jugs of different sizes feel free. Leave a comment below and let me know how it goes.

With all that being said, let’s get into the hack. I started by washing off the nutrition guide stickers that come on every milk jug. This may have been a mistake because it left over some sticky residue on the part of the jug that would eventually become the shovel.

Next, I grabbed a marker and marked the area I would cut out. This step isn’t mandatory. I just decided to do it because I thought it would be a helpful visual for this life hack. Then I cut along the dotted line. Well, I didn’t really cut it. It was more me poking holes along the line and dragging the shape end of the scissors down the line.

It was a little more difficult than I was expecting, but it wasn’t too bad.

In the end, it actually worked out pretty well. The medium-sized jug I used cut into a lovely shovel. Is this as good as a normal small gardening shovel you can buy? No. Metal shovels are more durable than plastic milk jug shovels. The plastic shovel was a little bit flimsy but I was able to do some digging with it. It would still be easier with a normal metal shovel though.

 

I have to admit, this isn’t the most useful life hack. I can’t really say that this life hack is for people who don’t want to spend money or for people who need a last-minute gardening tool. This hack takes too long to make for it to work last-minute and, honestly, I’m not sure if last-minute gardening is even a thing. If you’ve got the time and money to plant a garden, you probably have the time and money to go buy a real garden shovel.

I could see this being a fun arts and crafts project for kids though. Parents or grandparents could have a nice time making these shovels with their children or grandchildren and planting some flowers with them. Just as long as the child uses safety scissors or gets help cutting from the parent.
 

That’s it for this week of Life Hack Lab. Stay tuned for even more Life Hacks in the future!