Container garden

[Budley Doright]

This last week I bought a shitload of buckets at Lowes to make a container garden....


After doing some research I concluded that the Earth Box concept was what I was looking for..... but they are quite expensive.....


Here is a sketch of what mine will look like....

I hope to not have to water each container as I would with earthbuckets....


I hope to fill the trashcan reservoir and the nested bottom buckets would have 2 or 3 inches of water in each plant container....


Ive seen some pretty good veggie grows with this sort of system... that is earthboxes not my auto watering system.....

 

[Budley Doright]

This would be great for a patio if the patio is level.....


This very much depends of leveling all the buckets prior to planting......


Then leaving them alone for the season......


One of my issues is feeding.....


To feed....or not to feed..... that is the question......


Anyone interested?????


Other container gardens????

 

[geopolitical]

I like your setup, I have zero experience with earth boxes however. Really feeding comes down to how long the plant is going to be in the medium and how much food you want to be contained in the medium. A compost/zeolite/perlite mix will need less feeding than say, perlite & peat.

We use container gardening heavily here, our soil temps are barely above freezing so anything that gives you a few extra degrees of warmth can really accelerate growth. As far as leveling a very large area the easiest way is to fill it up, then use shims (wood, plastic, bits of old fruitcake, etc). Once you have the water setup you can just use the levels in each pot to adjust shims as needed. If you have very cold soil like I do this will also have the advantage of further decreasing soil to pot contact & heat loss.

 

[Budley Doright]

I had originally thought of creating a salad garden....


with the main components of a dinner salad....


Tomato cukes peppers radishes onions and lettuce....


My concern is the different requirements of the various plants....


So I think Im going to run several of these with just tomatos...

then one with peppers.... one with lettuce...... etc....


in that case the res may simply be a 5 gallon bucket with the ferts mixed for that plant type....


IOW Im afraid of burning my lettuce.....


GEO you may be interested.... Im assuming you are canadian....Im in michigan


I have on order 20 of the U of S cherries.....carmine jewel.....


Those I want to put in buckets for a year before planting out....



As far as shims.... Im looking at roof shingles......

 

[geopolitical]

Those are an old semi-sweet dwarf/bush. If they do well for you, you should look into "cherry plums" which have similar growth habits & larger fruit. Growth rates can really be phenomenal, be prepared for some pruning.

Be careful about overwintering in containers, it's generally better to at least hill up soil/mulch around the buckets for winter. The small mass of the containers means that temperature shifts ( both warm & cold ) will affect the plant to a much greater degree. This can be catastrophic when a warm spell causes container plants to come out of dormancy months early.

As far as lettuce goes leaf lettuces in my experience are a LOT more tolerant of nutrients being out of wack than head lettuce but not nearly as tolerant of heat. Lettuce also has the nasty tendency of storing excess nitrogen as nitrates in the leaves. There is some experimental data suggesting you could actually eat a fairly harmful amount this way. Celery can do the same thing though. Normally this will only take place under crap lighting or really low temps though, I doubt you have a worry.

 

[Budley Doright]

I dont have any cherry plums but I know of them......

I do have a new plum on order too this year......

I have maybe 15 varieties of other assorted plums as well.....



(P.P. 16621) A large-fruited dessert plum with superior winter hardiness. Bred by Prof. Brian Smith of UW-River Falls who spent years crossing cherry plums with Japanese dessert plums. The large, round plums are blue-black with very sweet, juicy, yellow flesh. Fruit ripens in early August, about 2 to 4 weeks earlier than other plums grown in the Midwest. Naturally dwarf trees require a pollinator - We recomend Toka.

 

[supermanlives]

i had 10 earth boxes once,. i have since made my own buckets. i use a hempy style bucket. i drill a hole about 2inches from the bottom and back fill with perlite and covering the hole with cheesecloth on the inside. then i layer cheesecloth on top of perlite and backfill with my soil mix. works great

 

[Budley Doright]

Thanks supermanlives.. My res bucket only has been modified with a hole and a grommet where frest water enters....


The inner bucket has a number of 1/4 inch holes on the bottom around the perimeter....


somewhere close to 10....


about 4 of them will have capilary matting strips which hang down in the res.... with the onther end well into the medium..... the strips are about 8 or 10 inches long.....

my hope is that these wicks will do the job better than the medium wicks used in the earthbox.....

 

[supermanlives]

sounds good . let us know how it works.

 

[jjfoo]

check out: http://www.globalbuckets.org/