Container Gardens

It’s hard not to completely avoid the gardening bug when you live up here, or maybe it’s just being surrounded by gardening commandos, of which there are plenty in our area. Whatever be the case, once spring kicks into full gear, the urge to get your hands into soil is hard to resist.

Now we decided not to do our garden for assorted reasons, and instead opted to do the community garden for other assorted reasons. The idea of doing container gardens also came up, and my first thought was “no thanks.” It seems like you would need either a lot of containers, or a few big ones. Would that mean buying them and then having to deal with them? While I tend to bite off more than I can chew, I wasn’t so keen on taking this one on. However, R and the kids mentioned the desire to do at least something around the house.

Then A came home with some lemon thyme, and wanted to transplant it. This inspired us to grow some herbs at home, and in container gardens, no less. I’m not completely clear what sort of containers are required, but it’s one of those things I probably shouldn’t over-analyze. Yeah, right.

It just so happens that we had a bunch of scrap wood in the barn, and I was a little unsure as to how to dispose of it. It was a support beam for the second story floor, of all things, so you can imagine its size. KB replaced it with a strong support, making it easier to do the sheetrock and also enabling him to remove a column that was in the middle of the floor. The only issue was, what to do with the old one? KB said to cut it up with a chainsaw and burn it, which I was prepared to do, but the wood was in decent condition.

The beam was made of two 2X8 boards that were nailed together. If I wanted to use them, I was going to have to pry them apart, which was no easy task. I had to use two crow bars simultaneously. Once that was done, I had boards that could be cut and then made into square boxes. In these we could grow our herbs. The beauty of this plan is that it also helped to clear some space in the barn. One less piece of clutter.

I screwed the sides together using 3.5 in screws, glue and long clamps (which I’m finding to be amazingly useful in the construction of wood furnishings), then put in a bottom, and we were good to go. The boxes are a bit heavy, but they should work fine. We have the monster bag of potting soil, so I think we’re good to go. The next step will be to transplant the herbs, and watch them grow.

Until then, thanks for reading.