Gardening in a Box

You might wonder what a backyard box with beans and broccoli has to do with aquariums. Nothing ... Nothing at all. Gardening is something I enjoy just as much as aquarium plants. And I can eat these! Take a look at my Garden Box photo album in the left-hand side column.

It's been a bit tricky gardening around here. I have large oak trees and a few evergreens that block the majority of sunlight coming into my backyard. Also, I recycle the leaves in the fall by mulching them and letting them decompose in the lawn. My lawn grows well, but given the shade and possibly all that mulch from leaves, I get poor results, except for astronomically large tomatoes.

So, I built myself a 4 by 10 foot box, painted it green and lined it with a painter's plastic to avoid rotting the wood and filled it with ten inches of garden soil. The bottom is a series of support struts and chicken wire. I poked a few holes in the bottom to let excess water drain out.

I didn't know if 10 inches of soil would be enough to grow things. With rain and watering, this compacted down a bit more. Results so far are very good. We've eaten several kinds of leaf lettuce, several servings of string beans, wax beans, peas, beat leaves, rutabaga leaves, white radish and we're waiting for carrots, broccoli, beats, rutabaga and a dozen cucumbers to finish growing. Not to mention, that I pulled out the lettuce and expect to have a new harvest of beans, beats and peas in late summer in its place.

I've learned a few things about placement in such a small space. First, broccoli would have done better had it been planted near the rutabaga and beats. The beans grow large and starve out too much sunlight. Some of the things I learned this year, I will apply in my planting next year. I will continue to add pictures to the photo album as I take them. Thanks for looking!

Comments

[GardenMad1]

This is great - I have a problem in my garden with shade created by large trees and am a bit disappointed that I can't grow many vegetables - this is obviously the answer - construct a planter and put it in a sunnier spot! I will definitely try this. thanks for the idea.