Laundry Table

Continuing on the theme of meeting furniture needs with stuff left over from the old kitchen, I bring you...

... Laundry Table:

Vertical Gardening, v1

Having such limited space, I've been interested in vertical gardening for a while. This weekend, I finished the planters for my first go at it.

I took an old 10' gutter that came down in The Big Project of 2014, and some short lengths left over from a recent replacement, and mounted them all to two 9'-long boards left over from the kitchen demo last year. Then I put them up on the new fence.

Lettuce will go in the top one (new materials) and succulents will go in the bottom one (old gutter) -- I'm not putting food in the bottom one because there is old roofer's tar in it.

Very interested to see how it goes!

In other vegetable garden news, I have held off on planting because I made a large pile of dirt digging the hole for the brick path that I need to deal with first. I am going to use it to level the yard a bit, but I can't do that until the rain stops long enough for me to do the work & then spread more mulch on top to prevent muddy paw prints. Maybe this weekend we'll get lucky.

Pickles doesn't care about the dirt pile problem. She thinks the brick path is the best, warmest bed ever:

Holding off on planting has given me a chance to consider the virtues of self-watering planters: improved yield with less work. Based on Farmer Wasserstrom's recommendation, it seems like they are worth a try. And no, I won't be building my own out of recycled materials. I'm actually going to *gasp* buy them new.

Anyone else try one of these systems (ex. EarthBox or Growbox)? Any pros/cons to share?

Brick Path

Forgot to post this last week. The sun came out, so I finally got to put in the brick path!

Dug a big hole:

Put sand in the hole to give the bricks a bed to settle into:

Put bricks in the hole:

Ta-da!