I Aim to Please!

Okay girlfriends,

For those of you who are interested in the earthboxes, here's what you do....

First, look at the earthbox website. Read about how to use them and what to do with all the plants, like how many you can fit into each box, etc...

Then, go to the homemade ones and learn how to make it much cheaper! This guy does a great job walking you through it step by step with pictures.

Now I have to be honest, this is quite an investment. It's not cheap to do these, but it's well worth it in the long run. You can use the boxes for three growing seasons before you have to replace the soil. You have to replace the fertilizer every time you plant something new in it. But it only takes a small strip of fertilizer. (You will read more about stuff like this on the earthbox website.) But of course, you have the boxes themselves until they break.

The yield is super high! So don't plant too much. We have been astounded at what these little boxes put out. I would venture to say, about 4 times as much as a conventional garden. So although you can fit 4 squash plants into one box, I would only put two in. They get so huge and it is overwhelming.

If you do tomatoes, make sure you stake them well from the beginning and only put one per box. Again, they get really huge and unruly. I think we have 2 to a box and it's just too much.

We have found that the secret to cantaloupe is to get them off the ground. They are a vine growing plant so get the fruit up off the ground so it doesn't rot before it has time to grow and ripen. We set a few of them just on top of the earthbox and I just set one on top of a planter yesterday that I found in my shed.

As far as watering, you are only supposed to have to do it once a week. We needed to water about every other day at first to get the plants going and then it slowed down for a while. Lately, it's been so dry that we've needed to water certain plants daily and others not very often. So you just have to watch them and see what they need. Peppers do not need to be watered often, it will kill them. They were looking really pitiful and we figured out they were just saturated. Once we got some of that water off, they flourished. The tomatoes are requiring lots of water these days.

So there you go. Let me know if you have any questions. If you want to do some this year, you can start fall crops in August!

Happy Gardening!!