Plant Box

Megan has been in a planting mood for quite some time now. Last fall she was planting stuff outside in anything she could find - a chalk box, egg cartons, random containers. Unfortunately the only thing that grew were weeds. Last summer we tried planting some wildflowers in the back yard planter. These looked like they might grow, until the gardeners inexplicably cut down the seedlings one day. She also had a pea plant in her room, although that went the way of the dodo due to lack of water.

So, this weekend we tried to make another go of it. Our achilles heel when gardening is usually the watering - we'll be good for a week or so and then start slipping. Maura found this interesting system called Earth Box, which billed itself as a self-watering system. From the pictures the idea looked simple enough - it uses a system called sub-irrigation. The idea is you have a reservoir at the bottom of the planter, with a couple columns of soil touching it. The soil acts as a wick, so the plants get watered from below, and the reservoir is big enough so you have to refill it infrequently.

It turned out that we had basically all the parts to make one of these lying around the house. A storage bin served as the planter, some about-to-be-recycled containers served as the reservoir, and we used a couple of spliced water bottles to be the tube through which you fill the reservoir.

So, I'll be the first to admit that at first blush it looks like we put a bunch of trash at the bottom of our planter, but after we put the soil in it looked just fine. We went out to the garden store and got some basil and blue boy flowers seeds, as well as some germinated strawberry plants. We'll see how it goes.


Since we were on a roll we also made an upside-down tomato planter out of a grape juice bottle. All of this is living on our front porch, hopefully we aren't violating any neighborhood ordinances.