Thursday, July 22, 2010

Planter's Boxes

Despite his temporary disability, my handy man make some planter's boxes a couple weekends ago. My parents in-law are building a new house and had a bit of leftover wood, which they generously gave to us so we could build the boxes.

Here are the boxes in the backyard, all set up:


The first box (below) is full of tomato plants. They also came from my parents in law. They were all "volunteer" plants -- i.e. they just showed up in the garden, unplanned. My in-laws do a lot of gardening every year and they plant a lot of tomatoes, so it's not uncommon to see some volunteers. This year they had a couple dozen tomato volunteers all around the yard. I took 16 of them home for my boxes; about 12 survived the move. I have no idea which kinds of tomatoes they are! Could be Roma's or cherries or early girls or golden or... you get the idea. Hopefully there's a variety:


The next box has several lettuce varieties (in the front) and some squash (in the back). The squash were all volunteers in our compost pile, so I don't know which kind they are, either:


(Sorry this third picture is at a weird angle.) The third box has another tomato, plus a basil and a cantaloupe. I got the tomato because we don't know which varieties are in the volunteers, and I wanted at least one early girl. I've never grown cantaloupe before, so it's a new experiment:


In the last box, I planted six squash seeds -- three yellow, and three zucchini:


The coolest part (so far)? I took those five pictures last Sunday. When I came out to water on Monday night, three of the squash seeds had suddenly sprouted into plants!

I am really enjoying gardening. The boxes make it much easier.

1 comment:

AMY AND MIKEY said...

That is so exciting! It's incredible how fast they can grow like the squash you watered the night before and then the next day they were already plants. That's amazing. I'm so glad you guys were able to get a garden going before the summer ended, and now it's all set up for next year, so next year won't be as hard. Not to mention all the free plants! I can see you becoming a mini- marie, and eventually fixing up your green house- you guys are going to have such yummy salads.....Mmmmmmmm. And there's something about having them in boxes that just make them look cute- not that it matters! But it's just nice to have them in boxes, it feels more organized.