I use a lot of recycled plastic containers for my indoor garden. You Grow Girl advises sticking to these plastics for safety:
1 – PETE
2 – HDPE
4 – LDPE
5 – PP
and avoiding these:
3 – PVC
6 – PS
7 – PC
The numbers refer to the symbols pressed on most plastic products, indicating their makeup.
There are all sorts of variations on this theme, but I love being delighted by new ideas: One of the videos linked to here shows a garden made out of kitty litter bins. They’d be the ideal height and width for square foot gardening (at least when supported by self-watering) and are readily available. “Farming asphalt” is really brought to life.
My windowsill tomatoes are now three feet tall and settling down to fruit. This is the time the suckers – new shoots start to take root (or stem, if you will). Their growth requires the plant to work harder and divert sugars that should be used to nurture its fruit. Left untended, they produce thicker foliage but weak tomatoes, so traditional wisdom is to pinch them out.
I did this last year and (being a lazy gardener) left the clipped suckers in the soil beneath the parent, expecting them to break down into mulch. But I was surprised to note, a few days later, that the suckers were looking healthy, and had even grown. This year, I was prepared: A pot with earth, kept moist, was prepared next to the tomato “patch” on the sill. A few days ago, I pruned back all the suckers, and transplanted them into the pot. Checking in on them today, I’m delighted to report that virtually all are thriving. My next challenge will be bringing some of these to fruit, for a late-summer successive crop!
Gardening is thirsty work, and a little bit of work with an empty pop bottle can slake your thirsty garden.
I found this website at the tail end of my 2008 gardening experiment, and implemented it with a couple of plants to great success. Last year, I scrounged as many empty bottles as I could and finished with seven plants happily dipping their toes. This year, a soda-water-loving pal has been stockpiling his empties, and the promise of an almost fully self-watering container garden is upon me.
Some people argue that the end result is not very pretty, but to my eyes, the exposed earth is far more appealing than the branded plastic pots I’ve salvaged from the local garden centres. I would also argue that, once the plants get established, you’ll be so overrun with healthy foliage that the pots themselves will hardly be noticeable. Plus, you get the advantage of being able to see which plants need a top-up, and just being able to watch the development of the root system is worth the price of admission. My ground cherry from last year failed to fruit, but it wasn’t for lack of trying: The root ball spilled out from the neck of the bottle and took up nearly half of the reservoir.
The instructions given on the site offer good basics, but for anyone wishing to try it, I’d advise tweaking a few steps: First, the “poke holes through with hot nails” is both unacceptably dangerous and time-consuming. I successfully used an old, blunt Exacto knife, pushed from inside the cut bottle (so there’s no “wall” created to block drainage) just enough to create a hole, then twisted to enlarge it. Occasionally the knife would cut a slit in the plastic, but I didn’t observe this to be much of a deterrent to the plants. I also skipped the pierced-cap and string “vein” proposed on many other bottle-planter sites, and instead stuffed the necks with cotton batting. Lacking small rocks for drainage, I layered dried grape stems to good effect. For nitrogen-loving plants like my tomatoes, I threw a handful of seaweed in once I’d covered the cotton batting with a couple of inches of soil, then topped the rest off with potting mix and some worm castings.
You’ll need to top-water until the roots start to creep towards the neck, but once the plants are established, this is a very easy garden to maintain. Just insure that the reservoir is topped up every day, and the plants will thrive. I had excellent success last year with my tomatoes, parsley, basil, and even the taprooted avocado I coaxed to sprout in my worm bin. This year, I’m adding snap peas to the pots as well.
A Dunkin’ Donuts in St. Petersburg, FL, has added an industrial-sized worm bin to its dumpster area, which it feeds with the waste from the coffee shop. That’s a big step up from the 3 Toronto Starbucks locations I visited this week; not a single one was aware of Grounds for the Garden. Come on, Starbucks! Get with the (corporate) program! My worms are jonesing for their caffeine fix!
http://www.ecobcil.com/blog/florida-dunkin-donuts-has-massive-solar-powered-worm-bin
Here’s an article on the founder of TerraCycle. This guy’s a personal hero of mine, as he mixes all of my favourite topics: environmentalism, entrepreneurialism, and savviness.
He learned about vermicomposting when a friend showed him the salutary effect worm castings had on pot plants, and has since built an empire based on the stuff others throw away.
TerraCycle collects organic waste to feed to their worms, whose castings and tea is sold in reused plastic bottles salvaged from the waste stream.
Szaky’s second “aha!” moment was “when we saw that the soda bottles people were discarding, or perhaps recycling, were also a perfectly good raw material. We had always been Dumpster diving for our office furniture, but that was the first time we realized that greatly expanding our Dumpster diving could fuel our production line. We had discovered that contemporary America is a vast Dumpster of industrial products that manufacturers are constantly throwing away or recycling — even when they’re in perfect condition.
One man’s trash is another man’s multi-million dollar fortune. More power to him!
http://www.princetoninfo.com/index.php?option=com_us1more&Itemid=6&key=05-13-2009%20terracycle