Container Gardening

My Mother’s Day gift this year from the husband and kids was an EarthBox.  The EarthBox is one of several gardening systems that hypes its unique design, many of which seem to be pretty close to identical.  I planted it that day, and after around a month have some early reviews.

What is the EarthBox?  The EarthBox is a planting system where all fertilization and soil preparation is done at the time of planting.  The soil is covered by a plastic cover to prevent weed growth and evaporation, and all watering is done from the bottom up: you pour water through a fill tube into a reservoir at the bottom of the container, and the potting mix wicks the water up into the soil where the plant can easily draw it.

First off, the EarthBox is on the pricey side for these solutions.  The basic kit is $55.  This does include potting mix, but I can get my own potting mix without much difficulty.  Their replant kit, which has just the fertilizer, nutrients, and covers, is $9.95 for 1, $7.95 if you buy 10 or more.

In contrast, the Garden Patch Grow Box, which I have never tried but which seems to be built on the same model, is $29.95 for the first kit (which does not include potting soil), and fertilizer strips range from $8.95 for 1 down to $4.95 each for 10 or more.

There are also dozens of people online who have made their own plans for building an EarthBox-style planter out of the kinds of $5-10 bins you can easily find at your local Walmart or similar store.

My experience in actually planting the Earthbox was a bit mixed.  I dont think the instructions were as clear as they could have been, and it got me in trouble a few times when I started doing something wrong and had to go back and correct my mistakes.

The black cover they provide is really very flimsy, especially near the places where holes are cut to allow the watering pipe or little plants to come up.  My first cover ripped while I struggled to get it into place over the box.  I managed to get the second one on mostly intact, but the holes were still stretched and distorted.

The system also does not seem designed to stand up to the elements well.  The wheels on mine are already rusted, and while the plastic box doesn’t degrade, it isn’t as attractive as many of the other options out there.  There’s no real reason to opt for an EarthBox for aesthetic reasons over the other self-contained planting systems.

Thus far, I am using the EarthBox for cherry tomatoes, and it is doing an incredible job with them.  Off of a single month’s growth, they are already rangy, full plants with good foliage.  They are beginning to flower, and I’ve spotted the first fruits on them as of a week ago.  I expect to get a fantastic yield from them.

My overall verdict is that the system works, but is a bit awkward and difficult to use, and high-priced.  If you want to pay for the convenience, you might consider a different kind of container system.  If you just want to try the idea, consider building your own.  I suspect I will, next year.

This is the first year I’ve done any experimenting with upside-down plants.  My husband bought me the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter for Christmas, and I’ve been itching to try it out for months.

A few months ago, I made an aborted effort to hang it in my sunroom.  It didn’t turn out very well: the hook ripped out of the ceiling, and the entire system crashed down to the floor, spilling dirt and crushing the seedling I’d placed in it.

Oops.

For my second try, I decided to take some extra precautions.  Below are the extra steps I took to ensure a stable mounting system for the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter.

1. Get a new hook
The hook they include with the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter is really very short for the load they expect it to bear.  I went out to my local hardware store and got a larger hook, designed to hold a weight of over 200 lbs.  Is that overkill?  Almost certainly.  But the last thing I want is to have the tomato plant get larger and fuller and lush, producing beautiful fruit… all of which is destroyed when the hook gives way.

2. Mount the hook horizontally, not vertically
When you insert the screw into the ceiling, the threads are the only part of the screw holding it in.  All the weight of the plant is working against the weakest part of the connection.  It would not take much splintering to rip the hook free of the stud into which it’s screwed.  When you mount it into a wall, parallel to the ground, the entire length of the screw helps support the planter.  The wood would have to crack significantly before the screw ripped loose.

3. Use potting mix, not soil
Soilless potting mix is much lighter than dirt, and will add less total weight to the system.  It’s much easier to hang it with potting mix than it is with soil.

I’ll update on the effectiveness of the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter later in the season.  Next year, I’m going to try some of the make-your-own recipes for upside-down planters, to see which are more and less effective.

One of the fun new gardening gadgets out there for curious experimenters right now is the Aerogarden. The Aerogarden is an aeroponic growing system for small plants, completely self-contained. It works like hydroponics, without dirt or mess, just air and moisture and lush plants.

It looks like a great idea, right? But before you shell out over $100 for one, you want to know: does the Aerogarden work? In my experience, the answer is “yes, to a point.”

To start with, the Aerogarden is incredibly easy to use. It gives detailed setup instructions, and has coded lights to tell you when to add water or add nutrients. It turns its grow lights on and off on a regular schedule designed to be best for the plants. You don’t need to know anything about gardening to use it.

Most Aerogardens start you with the Gourmet Herb Seed Kit, and I would definitely advise starting with that one. It contains two kinds of basil, parsley, chives, thyme, mint, and dill. The plants grow incredibly quickly. A few months in, I was chopping off handfuls of herbs to give away to friends and family because I could not use them quickly enough. A month after that, I was chopping off handfuls to compost, because I couldn’t give them away fast enough.

The herbs are the most successful plant for the Aerogarden, in my experience. It is fun to experiment with others: I liked being able to eat cherry tomatoes right off the vine in February, for example, and the lettuce mixes are fun, but in terms of value, I never got the same high-quality, consistent yield I got from herbs with another seed kit.

A few words of warning:

* The Aerogarden’s light is BRIGHT, and depending on your crop, it will be on 16-20 hours a day. You can tell it what time to turn off, but you don’t want to place it anywhere that a bright light coming on would wake you up.

* The Aerogarden is a WATER HOG. Our tap water is poor enough that it doesn’t work well with the nutrient tablets, so we use partly spring water. This can get expensive. Most people’s tap water seems to do fine with the Aerogarden, so take this caution with a grain of salt.

* It is expensive to maintain an Aerogarden. The initial expense is the easy part to see, but even once you’ve paid for the Aerogarden, you will need to replace your grow bulbs regularly, and just the new seed kits cost $20 each. It is an ongoing expense, and you want to make sure the value of the veggies or herbs is worth it to you.

Overall, I am very happy with my Aerogarden. I value fresh herbs highly, and this lets me have them all through the winter. If fresh herbs don’t make as much of a difference to you, it might be too high a cost to pay, but for real lovers of fresh food, it’s a good investment, albeit a significant one.