Urban Gardens

I am a container gardener and really like your project. Thanks for sharing as I may do some additional containers this summer, and yours would certainly fill the bill and a good way to use up scraps of lumber and accumulation of other stuff..go green…enjoy good food..

Robin, you keep calling this a space-saving design. It might look good, but it does NOT save space. Do the math. It’s primary virtue is its appearance, but its actual growing space would be greater if it only used the bottom layer. As for the deep-rooted carrots, there are short varieties (Danvers half-long, for instance) as well.

I garden in 240 sq. ft. in raised boxes with 10 ft tall trellises. Raising them higher would not add a single square inch to the plantable area. Lowering them would take nothing except convenience away. Those trellises are what make the difference, not the height of the boxes. Thanks to those trellises, I grow >$10.00 per square foot per year in those boxes, canning or drying most of it. It sure makes a difference in my grocery bill.

Plain old ordinary yellow pine, treated with linseed oil, will last at least ten years … that’s what my boxes are made of and they are presently in their 12th year and just now starting to get ratty-looking.

Joe said that celery “requires 3-4 feet deep of rich loam soil to grow well”. Really? The soil horizon below the first 12″ rarely has appreciable amounts of organic material in it. See here: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wiktionary/en/wiki/loam . I can give my plants 4′ of root depth … but that is unusual and only because I have 2′ deep boxes over 2′ deep trenches that were back-filled with baled straw 10 years ago. As the soil above subsides it is replaced with lightly forked in compost. I know of no other (sane) way of getting organic material 4′ deep. The boxes shown cannot possibly make good financial sense.

I love the look of this idea, but I used 5 gallon buckets with ollas buried in them to plant my garden this year. I have a yard, but the choke vines and the mint are so invasive that nothing lasts long in my beds before being overrun. And, everything dries out quickly in other pots, so it dies. So far, my little garden is looking good and it takes up very little space. Look at globalbuckets.org for instructions!

This is an old design, but still very nice and effective. I once saw in Africa a similar idea but using drums. 2 drums of different diameters were used to create a vegi patch that handicapped verterains in wheelchairs can tend to.
And as if by accident, it looked stylish as well!

Can’t some of you see how to do this? I can. There are 2 ways to look at this. You can have 3 levels with only 12 inches to grow your roots (which you would then need to block off each tier and support the next tier) or when completely full of soil you can tier the upper levels to the plants that need longer roots. So, maybe carrots or something for the top layer. I can see this working very well for some people.