Local Harvest / Farmers Markets / Family Farms / CSA / Organic Food How to Turn a Pallet into a Garden Good news and bad news. I had planned to film a short video showing you how to make a pallet garden, but the weather didn’t cooperate. I was stapling the landscape fabric onto the pallet when it started drizzling and got really windy. That’s the bad news. So keep reading my pallet loving friends, instructions on how to make your own pallet garden are just a few lines away… Find a Pallet The first thing you need to do is–obviously–find a pallet. Don’t just take the first pallet you find. Collect Your Supplies For this project, you’ll need the pallet you found, 2 large bags of potting soil, 16 six packs of annual flowers (one six pack per opening on the face of the pallet, and two six packs per opening on the top of the completed pallet garden), a small roll of landscape fabric, a staple gun, staples, and sand paper. Get Your Pallet into Shape Once you’ve dragged your pallet home, give it a once over. Let the Stapling Begin! Lay the pallet face down. Now for the sides. Caring For your Pallet
How to Grow 100 Pounds of Potatoes in 4 Square Feet | Apartment Therapy Re-Nest On many occasions, we've been tempted to grow our own potatoes. They're fairly low maintenance, can be grown in a pot or in the ground, last a fairly long time if stored properly, and can be very nutritious (high in potassium and vitamin C). Here's more incentive: according to this article, you can grow 100 pounds of potatoes in 4 sq. feet. Learn how after the jump... According to this article from the Seattle Times, potatoes planted inside a box with this method can grow up to 100 pounds of potatoes in just 4 square feet. Lumber Seed potatoes Soil Careful attention to watering The Times' guide for building a potato growing box yields up to a 100 lbs. of potatoes in a mere 4 square feet is shown below: Plant as early as April or as late as August 1, with an approximated 3 month till harvest turnaround time. Here are some pointers from the article: Cut apart larger seed potatoes, making sure there are at least two eyes in each piece you plant. Seattle Times via LifeHacker.
Small Footprint, Big Yield: Create an Easy Micro Organic Urban Garden Today! | Urban Gardens | Unlimited Thinking For Limited Spaces April 28, 2009 by Robin Plaskoff Horton There are two things urban gardeners are short on: space and time. The Urban Garden, brainchild of Bill Arquitt, resolves both of these issues, making it efficient and simple to plant a vegetable garden with up to 55 plants in a 3-foot deep by 4-foot wide footprint. The contained six level tiered system is nearly maintenance-free, eliminating heavy weeding, and its northwestern cedar construction renders it naturally bug repellent. Window Farming: A Do-It-Yourself Veggie Venture How to build My 50 Dollar Greenhouse First off – you really can build this thing very cheaply, but to do so you have to recycle, freecycle, and scrounge. If you just go out and buy new everything it will probably cost over $200 – still not bad all in all.This Article is featured in Jan 2010 issue of Birds and Blooms Magazine!Want to find out if this thing works before you read all this? Read 6 months in the Greenhouse first.Want to see what happens when a few inches of wet snow accumulates on this? Collapse! My $50 Greenhouse Welcome Stumbleupon Gardeners! Materials list Construction Steps Hind Sight – What I would do differently The planning is over and construction on my hoop house greenhouse has begun. After some research I’ve decided to build the structure of the hoop house out of 20 ft. joints of three quarter inch PVC plumbing pipe. My hoop house green house is going to be 11 feet wide and 15 feet long, and will be about seven and a half feet tall in the center. If your Greenhouse is too Flat it will collapse! Thusly
Farmers Markets Farmers markets are an integral part of the urban/farm linkage and have continued to rise in popularity, mostly due to the growing consumer interest in obtaining fresh products directly from the farm. Farmers markets allow consumers to have access to locally grown, farm fresh produce, enables farmers the opportunity to develop a personal relationship with their customers, and cultivate consumer loyalty with the farmers who grows the produce. Direct marketing of farm products through farmers markets continues to be an important sales outlet for agricultural producers nationwide. As of National Farmers Market Week, (the first full week in August), there were 8,144 farmers markets listed in USDA’s National Farmers Market Directory. This is a 3.6 percent increase from 2012.
Apartment Gardening: Turn a Filing Cabinet Into a Planter Yes you can have a garden, even in an urban home. No yard is no excuse. "Apartment Gardening: Plants, Projects, and Recipes for Growing Food in Your Urban Home" is what every city-dweller with a green thumb needs. Author Amy Pennington explains how to make recycled planters from everything -- wine boxes to milk crates. Even if you're not living in an urban environment, you'll love the recipes and can easily use the project ideas for deck and indoor planting. Luckily, Pennington and the crew behind "Apartment Gardening" was kind enough to share a sneak peak of one of our favorite projects from the book. My friend Matthew Parker is one of those people who has vision. They don't cost much-in the neighborhood of fifty bucks-and while they are ugly to look at, if you remove the drawers and turn them onto their backs, they make an awesome planter. If you're into the whole shabby chic thing, drawers can be used for shallow planters, as well. Directions 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.