Saturday, July 19, 2008

Square-Foot Gardening?....Sterilite Gardening!

My big project for this mid-summer was going to be square-foot gardening, after reading a little about it on a couple of my favorite blogs I read, when I read blogs (Little But Loud and The More The Messier). I started out building a compost myself..that would be the picket-fence-like structure. We had to dress it up a little by putting flower boxes around it, just in case it stunk like crazy, any neighbors coming to investigate would never suspect something so lovely would stink so bad. Turns out, it doesn't stink so bad! Then, I got all the components I needed for my project, the garden, and a former farmer told me that some good old black dirt mixed with peat moss and sprinkled with a little cow manure was my best bet. He said he's heard that vermiculite is possibly a carcinogen. That was all I needed to hear and I decided a good old fashion garden would be my garden of choice. Then when I got home, I could find two different drills, several drill batteries, and one battery charger...none of which went together! This botched my idea of cutting the board I had found to make a perfect 3'x3' garden. I found a bunch of Sterilite containers we had been using to collect rain water to use for watering our flowers and tomato plants, punched holes in the bottom, and planted my little garden in Sterilite containers!!! The plants are growing, so what more can I ask for? :)










5 comments:

Shellie said...

Wow! now you're a step ahead of me, I never built a compost pile, but I need to, desperately! That is an inspiration to me.

Darla said...

We've gotten a little bit obsessive about it...I researched it to find out exactly how to do it to make soil the fastest. We learned what foods to compost and found out what other stuff you can compost (hair and dryer lint are a couple odd ones we would never had imagined)! We don't water our lawn much so now during the heat it doesn't grow much so we have a neighbor who has promised to save us their clippings when they mow so we can have an equal mix of grass clippings and food stuff (supposed to have equal parts of nitrogen and carbon material just for ideal circumstances...doesn't have to be that way to be successful...just faster composting that way and less stinky). I'll have to post on our whole project soon..it's been so much fun!

Suburban Correspondent said...

Hey - there is no way my blog post inspired anyone to garden!

Can you date your posts? Or do you already and I am missing it?

Darla said...

I actually do date them but I posted like 7 or 8 postings in a 24 hour period. Making up for lost time....the last time I had posted was May 2nd! :) They apparently don't like to date each entry, you only get one shot at the date stamp per day, I guess!

Regarding the gardening, I actually, in one sitting one night at work, read about this square-foot gardening first in one person's post, then in the other's (yours and Shellie's). I don't remember if either of you had positive experiences with it but I was curious what exactly it was so I googled it. I have been so desparate to garden for so many years that I thought, "Heck, this is something I could whip together myself..I don't need to wait for my husband to get a raised-bed garden constructed for me(I've waited about 5 years for that to happen)." Then I ended up with this very modified version of it instead! :)

Carrie and Troy Keiser said...

My sister has a compost,or she did..... your garden looks good to me and I LOVE the old fence!