f13.net

So I didn't see a thread on this topic. I know that one can purchase an Earthbox, but those seem spendy for the size.

I'm looking at using 18 gallon and 10 gallon tote boxes, some cheapo plastic pots (the thin plastic) for my water wicking soil, and some pvc pipe for watering. Has anyone else worked on this kind of thing? I've seen some videos on YouTube and looked at plans online. I have a smallish porch on which I can grow some things (WSW exposure). Last year, I had reasonable luck with tomatoes. I also have another cement landing/porch outside my door, which faces north (meh). Based on what our other neighbors do, I can also fit two planter contraptions outside our garage door, which faces east, basically.

Has anyone else tried this? Raised beds aren't an option (townhouse) and my mom's garden is so far gone that any effort to do raised beds and square foot gardens in her yard would involve a lot more than just some wood and soil (she will probably sell in a year or two, so not worth the effort). I'm outside Chicago if you need to know that for climate purposes.

So yeah, relevant experience would be awesome, mostly with regard to plant choice.

Just spent the whole day making an 8' X 3' raised bed container with cedar, but I have 3/4 of an acre of backyard, so that's just using my options. Planning to do more over the week--I think it's the solution to some really backbreaking weeding out and low soil quality in the gardens I've tried so far. Plus I hope it will be a big fuck-you to the rabbits.

My brother is doing astonishingly productive gardening with mostly containers using the plastic you describe, with a WSW exposure. So it's definitely possible. Takes a lot of work. He has a rowhouse. He's gone a bit nuts in terms of anti-squirreling the thing (nets over the entire enclosed backyard) but he's getting some pretty amazing yields.

There's a farm on the highline here in NYC that is composed of milk crates lined with semi-permeable fabric and filled with soil. They've been raising some pretty amazing stuff there for one of the farm-to-table restaurants in the area.

Find a good local gardening center. Not a big box home center. Find the most knowledgable person there and pick their brain.

I did container tomato and basil two years ago, but I get good southern light. I hand watered them. Last year I put in a raised bed and I'll probably put in a second this year, so that's about the extent of my knowledge of containers, sorry.

Since growing tomatoes on the front range is difficult due to short growing season, dry climate and crap soil I went with a couple earth boxes. they do work well and give me a jump on the growing season because I can plant early and wheel the plants outside when the weather is decent and wheel them inside at night or when it snows.  A while back I found this article on making your own.  http://www.instructables.com/id/how-to-make-an-earth-box/ Haven't tried it but if I ever decided to add more boxes it's the route I'd go.

Thanks for the link. I've watched a few YouTube videos, but I'm the kind of person who prefers to read instructions.

Not for container gardening, as this guy is all about raised beds, but just to link for posterity: http://www.amazon.com/Vegetable-Gardeners-Bible-Edward-Smith/dp/160342475X/

That's my go-to reference so far.

Just so I'm clear - "growing tomatoes" is just new slang for weed, right?  :grin:

Aging gamers.  I think they really mean tomatoes.

You can easily buy much better weed than you (the average you) can grow at home.  Tomatoes you pretty much gotta grow yourself if you want them to be perfect.

From heirloom seeds, because fuck the shipping/ bruising resistance they've bred in commercial varieties over the last 20 years. Things taste like fucking rubber and are barely worth cooking with.

My new batch of "tomatoes" arrives tonight.  I suck hard at gardening (my sister has two bright green thumbs) but I'm brilliant at "growing tomatoes". 

This. Besides, I would likely grow weed via an aquaponics system instead of outdoor containers. Fortunately, no need to DIY that.

One day I'd like to sample your tomatoes.

Pretty much both of these.  Where I live I can legally (at least per state law) grow up to six tomato plants for personal use, but since I haven't indulged in those kind of tomatoes since I was a teenager I don't bother.  I did read a few how to grow tomatoes articles when the law passed and it looks like entirely too much work and expense.

That is actually what we used to call it, iirc the soil conditioners were similar so you could use that wording at the garden center. But I haven't , erm, gardened that crop since the 80s...

I really miss it and hope they'll legalize in NY state so I can get a small garden. Like Slack says, it would still be a hydro thing because it's such a high theft crop (and I live near 2 schools, so it would be the responsible way to do it).

Sam, you can buy better weed if you have the right hookups, but it's still quite illegal in most of the country. Back in the day we were growing stuff that was similar to modern stuff (lots of crossbreeding for traits, dedicated breeding program, etc); it wasn't until we moved into your neck of the woods that we found anything similar commercially available.

That said, there is something really beautiful about having a breeding program and curating a seed collection, then caring for the plants for a few months and of course enjoying the results. Same thing with tomatoes, but the payoff isn't so, erm, high.

When I said "the average you" what I was thinking was "unless you're Sky."   :awesome_for_real:

You guys inspired me. I planted a few things in pots on the balcony last year, but didn't have the best luck, other than some mint, which apparently will devour my whole patio if I let it.

So I made this:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20557826/IMAG01632.jpg)

I don't get much sun this time of year, so I focused on veggies that don't need to ripen. That's two mixed lettuces, two brussel sprouts, and three green beans. Pic is right after I planted them. A week later and everything is looking quite healthy.

We were trying those MiracleGrow seed pods you may have seen around places. They retail for about a buck a piece and are "Guaranteed" to grow, so we thought let's try some Cucumbers, Lettuce, Peppers and Tomatoes since we use those a lot in cooking.

So far, of the 6 we bought only 3 have sprouted and it's been almost 2 weeks.  Not a great success rate.  I think we'll move back to seedlings from the nursery.

Which ones are sprouting?  Peppers and tomatoes can take two weeks or more.  Lettuce and cukes you should see within a week if conditions are good.

So far this year I've started 16 jalapenos, 6 Hungarian peppers, several varieties of tomatoes, two zucchini, and ten pickling cucumbers.  I need to start another batch of cukes, and then spinach/peas/Chinese yard long beans.

This is my first year with suitable grow lights in my garage, it's making things much simpler than trying to do it in the house.  Everything's just planted in small reusable pots filled with leftover straight soil amendment (gardner & bloome harvest supreme)  Plants were slow to start, but I blame that on the low temperatures--the garage is unheated and was hovering slightly below 50 degrees during the day.  Adding one heater raised temperatures to 60+, and everything's taken off since then

Oddly, the Tomatoes were both sprouting.  The other one was a cucumber if I remember, might have been a pepper.  I checked on Monday and blame old age for forgetting which ones they were.

I'm told if they're warm enough tomatoes can sprout fast, but I've never seen it.  Then again, I'm not heating the place to 75-80 degrees just for them.  By mid-summer they're weeds anyway; I can barely keep up with the harvesting and sucker removal.

That's with 3-4 plants, which is all you can squeeze into an 8x4 raised bed without it turning into a goddamn jungle.  Usually I've got an Early Girl, two types of cherry tomatoes (red and yellow pear), and some other type.  I'm still trying to find a good beefsteak-type tomato plant I like.

I like San Marzano tomatoes. Less pulp than a normal tomato, more flesh than a Roma. I lost the photos of them ripening on the vine when my SD card went; but here's an early shot. They really sucked up that cow poop and went jungle.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3667682/Photos/Garden/Garden-8.jpg)

Also: goddamned deer.

It's odd, we have seriously aggressive deer wandering into the garden but they really don't give a shit about the tomatoes I grow every year. The big problem is that they just love to absolutely strip the leaves off the grapevines I'm trying to coax into growing big enough to yield for a few bottles-of-wine worth each year, which is retarding the year-to-year growth of the vines. They and the rabbits also go for lettuce pretty hard.

Squirrels pretty much nail the peaches on my two trees every year and I get maybe one yield of blueberries before every songbird within ten square miles descends on the bushes. I netted it one year and the damn things just crawled under the nets and then panicked whenever anyone came through the yard, since they couldn't just fly away.

Trying to actually feed yourself and your family in a sustained way with a garden would be pretty damn difficult. You'd pretty much have to have dogs or something similar in the land you were growing on from March to October, and be spending most of your waking hours tending to the land. (Or hunting out varmints near your plot.) Any time I hear someone getting all romantic about back to the land and all that, I know they don't have the faintest fucking idea what it would really be like to be totally dependent upon agriculture.

Pioneers had it easy, man!  They didn't have to deal with finding parking near the entrance to the local Wal-Mart.

I knew it!

In all seriousness:  I'm a total tomato fiend.  The last few years I've been growing cherry varieties (Sweet 100's, Sun Golds), as I've found those make killer pasta sauces (especially paired with fresh basil and aregano!), however we've moved to a new house with a much larger lot and would like to try some larger varieties.

Any recommendations?  My grandfather always grew very firm varieties of beefsteaks, but I'm open to suggestions.  We're also in a very temperate area - maximum temps during the summer are 85-95 degrees, whereas I heard beefsteaks prefer 100+ to get maximum flavor.  I'm also wondering if a greenhouse makes sense, as deer have attacked everything I tried to grow outside last year.  Perhaps just a large cage with chicken-wire over the outside?

(Oh, and by 'aregano' I mean weed.)

I had to have an 8' chain link fence put up around my orchard/garden/berry patches.  Repellent would keep the dear from eating things, but the bucks still came through in the fall and wrecked a bunch of young trees rubbing their antlers on them.  It's a tradeoff for living in the country--sure, you see deer, elk & moose, but they're a lot less cute when they're eating your strawberry plants.

If I'd known at the time my wife wanted to keep chickens (we have 60-ish now) I'd have gone with the double-fence technique:  two shorter fences with about 4 feet between them.  Deer supposedly won't jump into a space they can't easily jump back out of.  I don't know if that works, but I could have just roofed between the two fences with chicken wire and presto, instant chicken run.  Too late now...

And naturally, no fence is perfect.  It does nothing to keep out the cats, who like to shit/dig in the raised beds  :uhrr:

We had to fence in the area to protect against deer.   Made sure the fence was at least chest-high, or they'd jump over it.  We have chicken-wire; barbs of any kind will actually attract them - they like to use the barbs to scratch ticks off their sides, so you're looking at increased risk of lyme disease.

Cats can probably murder the birds enough to dissuade them, but if you get a flock of starlings your grapes will be gone in a few minutes.  We don't have pet cats but the neighbors do, and there are some strays too, so we're lucky.

We buy tomatoes as young plants (8-10 inch tall) in the spring and just transplant them to the lot.  Beefsteaks I think.  They require A LOT of water (every morning, every evening), and to be tied to support sticks when they grow (3ft tall sticks, we actually use 3/4 in. PVC pipe as it lasts over the years).  We have rows to channel and keep the water, and the ground is covered with a black tarp to prevent weeds from growing, with holes for each tomato plant and its stick, about 1.5 ft of spacing between the plants.  The tomatoes grow huge, and they are juicy and delicious.  120 plants you can get a full pail a day, for 2 months, once they get going (you can pickle green tomatoes too).

We also have some (elongated) peppers and small cucumbers, not as many as the tomatoes, but they give some extra flavor to salads.

For feeding family "throughout the year", we have two full size freezers and we chop up the ripe tomatoes with some bell peppers and celery, and pack them (with the juice) in many Ziploc bags which then get frozen solid.  You can make soups and tomato-based meal sauces from that for the rest of the year; the soups will taste as if made with fresh picked vegetables.

Problem is, I live in the city :) But I back onto woods and there's only one other road between my patch of woods and miles of wilderness (where my old singer took the 16th biggest buck in the state back in the day).

My next step after fencing is the addition of a low voltage charge, per a family friend who lives deeper in the Adirondacks in a place lousy with deer. They need to up the quota, they've been getting worse the last few years. A mother raised three fawns in my backyard a couple years ago.

They also eat the seed out of my bird feeders, so my cat tv lost the best channel. And I had defeated the damned squirrels! I'd really like to fence in the yard at some point.

And I'll reiterate: San Marzano. Really nice for Italian style dishes, I eat so much caprese salad in the summer...

Finally, fuck starlings. Winged assholes.

We just bought a San Marzano plant this weekend. We love Romas and the nursery's description of the Marzano plants made them seem appealing. Only one, though, since I know enough people who keep 3-4 plants and then bring them into work to "get rid of some of these damn tomatoes"

L2Can.  :why_so_serious:

Seriously though...canning is a shitty process especially in the summer.

You can freeze tomato sauce fairly well if you don't want to can.  Since I've got a stand up freezer and don't want to deal with pressure canning I freeze excess vegetables.  I've been thinking about trying out dehydrating stuff this year.  To be honest going small and focusing on stuff that really does taste better fresh from the garden is probably the way to go for most people.  I do can pickles since I've come across a few recipes that I really like and growing enough green beans, peppers and beets to put up a winter's supply is fairly simple with a small plot and a few containers.

I planted over 20 tomato plants  :why_so_serious:

Canning isn't happening here due to the time involved. It saves nothing and we both work over 40 hours a week. There's other things to do besides tending to chores from the 19th century.

Pickles, neither of us enjoy outside of cucumbers and it's cheaper to buy a jar of vlassic than mess with all that. Not to mention the goddamn smell; mom pickled bread & butters when I was a kid and it made me ill every year.


Exactly what we've chosen to do. There's supermarkets for a reason and that gets us through the rest of the year.

That's a *lot* of tomatoes.

Edit to add: We usually do 3 tomato plants and 3-4 tomatillo plants - mostly for fresh salsa but sometimes for salads. That's more than enough for our family of 4, we always have extra. (We also plant various peppers in pots and other vegetables in a garden bed area).

I plant 10-15 tomato plants a year also. End of summer make a lot of sauce. It's the only way to get a lot of the great varietals that I really like that are never in markets (or are crazy expensive). Black Krims and Brandywines are especially fantastic, though Krims can be hard to get a good yield with.

The other vegetables that completely repay growing are beans of all kinds--they taste completely differently than what you get in market--and peas.

Herbs, lettuce and hot peppers are worth it for the convenience in terms of summer cooking, plus hot peppers of various kinds preserve well--just dry them out at the end of the summer. Lettuce you can keep cutting off the leaves while the plants are small and you'll get a continuous yield for a long time.

Squash and eggplant I'm on the fence about. Good to have but fussy and inconsistent. Zucchini are good if you take care always to harvest them very small; when they get big they're mealy and tasteless.

I'm trying carrots and radishes again this summer but the yields are usually ridiculously low. Soil has to be loose for there to be any hope at all. Pickling cucumbers are good.

I don't have a lot of good space for more (short of digging up a fair amount of the front yard, which the husband would nix) so I'm only doing 1 tomato plant and lettuce again (fresh romaine was awesome!) plus maybe a green pepper plant.  Don't have space or containers for more, although I wish I did.

Have you considered a community garden plot?  The plots are generally big enough to grow a decent selection of produce and the price is fairly low.  They usually handle the heavy work like tilling and provide convenient water spigots for watering.  Although finding an available plot this late in the season might be difficult.  I help run a 30 plot garden and we've had a waiting list since February.   We are expanding out to 40 plots but the new plots won't be usable till next spring.

My village does have a community garden, but like you said, it's probably all filled up by now.  Plus, it's over on the far west edge of town and I love on the far east side of town, so it's not very convenient for regular visits. 

I think this year I'm going to add some pots on the side of the garage since that gets good east/south exposure.  We have a concrete pad outside the side door (that we never use) where I can put the pots.

A friend of mine made one of these for the deck of her condo.  It might work out well in the space you are talking about.  http://www.growingagreenerworld.com/creating-a-pallet-garden-step-by-step-instructions/

So I just finished building this for my mom for Mother's day. It's 6 feet by 3 feet and 30 inches tall. Pretty much just winged it but feel it turned out pretty well. Thinking when I line it I'll staple gun the liner to the top and then put a lip on it to make it look nicer.

(https://nrk8xw-ch3302.files.1drv.com/y2pOqJ-7Yd4Pz-yk77S39V5Co-DCAmq5Eu1FfdT9VqzFLhcOUhOKqeS1wKhUSg0ETtB9-2MSX0DYC-0EkOlaZd_0bzQaLC0rfw9GbLNKeLDwQNYRQs83o8SWe-zERbLadtcQ42qs2HMcgvO1IGBfE5IWoIjriBQ0MKTExVD6AJat08/WP_20150509_003.jpg?psid=1)

My brother just built a bunch of these using cedar fence pickets which were dirt cheap - 5/8" x 4" x 6' pickets are $1.29 each, but you'll need a planer.

My homemade earthbox I posted last page has had some interesting results. The mixed leaf lettuce is growing like crazy and I've pulled several small salads worth so far. The beans on the other hand have grown about three whole inches, so I'm not expecting much there. Then there's the brussel sprouts. I've never grown them before and really didn't know how big they got. Yea, they get big. Growing like weeds, so I expect I might get some good results (if the whole thing survives moving across town next month).

Brussel sprouts grow huge and they are kind of hard to handle. Not good for your average container box, actually. Also need to be planted early spring or late late summer--they like cold.

That's a good idea and I may try that on the next one. Using those would probably save me $15 to $20 depending on the price I can find.

He got his at Home Depot, if that helps.

I don't get the planer part. Why not just cut off the tops with a crosscut and sand them a bit?

He wanted a nice finished look, to the point of miter cutting all of the visible joints, etc. and the planer let him work with nice straight boards instead of slightly wavy/warped ones.  Not really necessary with this sort of carpentry, but he's got the same OCD I do and overdesigned/overbuilt/overworked a bit.  I probably should have noted that 'a planer would make the finished product look nicer' instead.

I'm the one who overbuilds  :oh_i_see:

(http://i1174.photobucket.com/albums/r614/Polysorbate80/IMG_0839.jpg) (http://s1174.photobucket.com/user/Polysorbate80/media/IMG_0839.jpg.html)

That's this year's garlic crop (heirloom hardneck red variant), planted last October.  Can't see it in the terrible picture, but the one behind is asparagus.  It's only in its second year so it's not prolific enough to harvest yet.  I've currently got 8 boxes, with another 4 planned.  I also need to add bark or something for grass/weed control between boxes, it's a bitch to mow in there.

Mine are 2x6 redwood, 8' long by about 3 1/2' wide.  Fence pickets would be too flimsy for my taste.  Wet dirt is heavy, and the sides might bow.  I added the extra (possibly unnecessary) side bracing to control that, and to allow for support of the 2x4 top rail.  It's nice to have a place to put things or to sit while working.

The downside is price; they're about $200 apiece, but they're super durable.  They're also crazy heavy, but they only need to be moved once

They also look awesome.

*Adds notes next to Polysorbate80 & veredus - ask for advice on building coffins for next time*