What I did this weekend

[telophase]

Or Sunday, rather. We bought an upright planter thingy and Toby painted it with water sealant and then put it together for me yesterday. Then Sunday morning we hit the shops and bought a couple of extra tall pots, plus dirt, rocks for drainage, and seedlings, then I spent the day getting that all set up.





Distorted because that was taken with the Panorama setting on my phone's camera. The wood looks warty due to water beading on the sealant, by which we can tell: it works.

Anyway! Tomatoes in the pots on either side, and patio tomatoes in the single planters on the lwoer corners of the setup. Onions in the bottom middle two (because onions), Japanese eggplant in the top middle. The left upper planters hold 3 varieties of peppers (jalapeno, a non-spicy hybrid jalapeno, and a bell pepper) and cilantro, and the right upper planters hold 3 varieties of basil (sweet, lime, and cinnamon) and rosemary.

This is an experiment: we can easily rearrange the planters as they just slot onto the slats, and as they hold plastic pots that we can remove and rearrange as well. We'll see how things grow and which ones thrive, and rearrange them as necessary for more or less sun and so on.

Comments

[yarrowkat]

looks lovely! how will you keep it watered? (asks the desert-dweller). is there an irrigation system inside that structure?

[ex_christina_maria783]

Amazing <3 The planter set up is gorgeous! Great find, I love that it's essentially a screen too, so added privacy with it.

[telophase]

The old-fashioned way: there's a faucet and hose in the wall just out of frame to the left. :) If that gets to be too tedious, we'll see if we can rig something up, but for now it's pretty much go out every day and water the garden.

edit: Also, the planter boxes are set up so that water drains into the ones under it, so you can water the top and it helps the stuff on the bottom as well. (As long as the ones on top don't contract some horrible disease or something, I suppose!)

I'll probably look more into what should be drier and what should be wetter and rearrange as suits.

[telophase]

Thanks! It was an impulse buy at Costco, but a couple of years ago we had a small plot out back that grew some impressive tomatoes, and I'd wanted raised beds of some sort because my knees aren't up to kneeling and working in a ground-level garden, so when we spotted this, it made sense. I like that now when I sit on our new patio furniture I've got something to look at besides that fence. XD

[movingfinger]

Love your planter! Cherry tomatoes and peppers tend to do very well in that kind of setup, they really love sprawling and they look wonderful. And that lattice back will allow you to support them on that, too. Really nice setup.

[telophase]

Thanks!

I suspect the tomato in the blue pot on the left is going to grow mostly sideways, given that the spot it's in gets the least sun, but I figure we'll be tying it to the planter to support it and keep it from blocking too much of the other plants. Or we'll give up and move the pot.

[yarrowkat]

oh, that's handy, the drip-down bit. i always end up killing things that require me to hand-water them, but this is partially because i run a 4-acre farm that is on an array of automated irrigation systems -- so there's a day every spring and fall where we go around setting up and taking down the systems, but then everything just waters itself after that. also it's *very* dry here, so stuff lives better that way, if it can get water when nobody is looking at it.

if you get bored with hand-watering, i bet you could run a drip system vertically up the two sides of it, with emitter line coming to each pot. it would be slightly odd but i bet it would work.

anyway, great-looking vertical garden!

[telophase]

Makes perfect sense for you! We may do something like that if it turns out we forget to water or something, but at least with being able to see it out the back door, I'll be less likely to do that. XD

[indywind]

Wow, impressive!

[telophase]

Thank you!

[umadoshi]

Wow, I love the planter! (I literally just saved your photo in case I can find anything at all similar.)

[telophase]

Thanks! We got it in a flatpack at Costco. This particular one is cedar, and after looking cedar up, Toby decided to go ahead and put the water sealant on it*. And the screw holes were wonky or something, which mean he ended up stripping one, so he went to the hardware store and picked up some metal plate things to join the top to the bottom. It's probably sturdier now than it would have been previously.

*Turns out old-growth cedar has internal oils and stuff that makes it extremely water-resistant, but almost everything available in cedar nowadays is young, and it hasn't built that protection up, so it's recommended to seal it.

[umadoshi]

I poked around the Canadian Costco site, but your excellent planter seems to be US-only. Alas! But they do have a nice range. and we might wind up getting some from them anyway.

[brigdh]

That's awesome! Good luck with your garden. I'm attempting to grow various container plants this year too, but mine are much less impressively in pots on the ground. :D

[telophase]

Thank you! :D We'd been thinking of raised beds, but there was no way we'd get around to putting them in for a couple of years at least, so when we saw this, we grabbed it.