A New Project in the Garden

The first post after being back is one that I have been talking with many people lately and they have asked for a better description then I have provided verbally.  The project I'm referring to is growing vegetables in Earth Boxes.

An Earth Box is a growing system that has a water reservoir in the where the water is drawn up to the plant via capillary action of the grow media.  The Earth Box product is a very good product and they seem to hold up well, the down side is they are expensive, so being the cheapskates, errr I mean resourceful individuals we are, Trudy and I decided to build our own.

We took a normal storage tote, in this case a Rubber Maid tote.

We drew a grid on the box I also drew places for 3 separate holes which will become evident as you scroll down.

In the grid that I drew on the lid Trudy or Jake drilled holes whereever the lines intersected.

I threw this in for no particular reason.

Part of the lid, you see that the grid that was drilled has been cut out of the middle of the lip of the lid.

Another component of the DIY earthbox is 1/14" PVC pipe, these are cut down to 4 in legnths, but all the other boxes are cut to 6 inches.

Here is the drilled and cut grid of the earth box, the small holes allow rain water to pass down to the reservoir.

The two bigger holes are what will help draw the water up to the plants, the little hole allows us to fill the water reservoir.

So here is the grid, the Solo cups have holes in them, and will be filled with planting mix, then sit down in the reservoir and wick water into the soil.

The grid will sit on the PVC, which will act as support.

We ended up assembling 13 of these boxes.  Here you see the fill tube which allows us to fill the reservoir.

We also filled the boxes with planting mix.

The covers for these are white garbage bags, we covered the boxes to help reduce evaporation.  We'll cut holes where we plant seeds or seedlings.

 That's it for now.  If you have questions let me know.

Thanks all!