Garden Box Farming

Seyoung has taken an interest in growing plants in the window over the past couple of months (if you look in the window you can see the lettuce.) She started growing lettuce and green onions and I thought that a small outdoor garden might be fun. 

I looked into "lasagna gardening", which seemed really easy, except that you need to have a bunch of compost to start it. Then thought about garden boxes.

I mentioned the garden thing to someone at work and they said that if I needed some pallets to make the boxes I could have some. Brad and I took home an assortment of pallets over several trips until I had enough to make two grow boxes and enough left over to make a compost bin and a couple of planters. The hardest part was breaking down the pallets and removing the nails. 

We now have two garden boxes measuring 1m by 1m by 50cm deep (500 liters of earth each). The boxes are lined with heavy polyethylene and I cut down 30 or so 2 liter clear plastic soda bottles to use as cloches. 

 Seyoung had already started lettuce, green onion and a few other things, some of which have been transplanted into the garden to see how they'll do.  She's also started a bunch of herbs indoors for the second garden box (it isn't filled with soil yet). 

One of the worst things we have to contend with here, besides the 5 hours of sunshine per month, is SLUGS.  I've looked into ways of controlling them and settled on one thing to try first.  I'll post about that later.