Mountain Biking: Rubber side down- Time for a TurnaroundWell, my friends, things are finally looking up, and good timing, too, since I’m sure you’re all sick of me bitching. Recent bike build, including wheels… fun! In what feels like a fairly short time, I’ve come from sitting around … Continue reading → […]
- This Raised My PulseHey, baby… wanna ride? I may be injured, but I’m not dead yet. I can still have racy thoughts. Here’s more info. In other news, UBI was an awesome success! I had a blast. I highly recommend it. Overhaul day…. … Continue reading → […]
- Time for a Turnaround
- Edgy Veggie
DIY terraced urban farm, part one
So I’m making a thing.
We have a very small balcony, but it gets so much sun that it seems like a waste not to grow tons of stuff. We’ve already started with hanging tomatoes — don’t worry, we bring them in at night still — and strawberries. But we’re fired up.
This whole year, I basically promised myself I’d try things I’m not good at way more often. Sort of a masochistic New Year’s resolution. Judging by the amount of times I’ve felt very stupid this year, it would appear to be working. In any case, growing food certainly qualifies, so we’re going at it, full steam. Pictures and tales of adventure below the fold!
I wasn’t sure how I was going to maximize the amount of sun we could use until I was reading — you guessed it — Fresh Food From Small Spaces. R.J. writes about how beautiful terraced farms can be, and I thought, hey, that might be an attractive and neat way to use our south-facing balcony. So! To the Internet! I searched “terraced planter” and a couple of variations on that to no avail.
I have enough faith in my Googling skills to believe that such a thing either doesn’t exist or is out of my price range. Next step: sleep on it. Then, wouldn’t you know it, I get a picture of a very clumsy terraced planter in my brain. So I woke up and drew it and thought about it at work all day.
After work, I had about half an hour to kill, so I raced over to Home Depot to get some lumber. No turning back now! A nice fellow named Rick or Nick cut lumber from their culled pile (a.k.a. a little beat up or scrap or something and therefore very cheap), which set me back $2.04, and I bought a box of wood screws, which were like $5, and then I picked up my girlfriend and we went to McGuckin and bought planters which, at $9.99 apiece, were the most expensive part of the operation.
Probably didn’t have to be that expensive. Easy to feel dumb about that but hey, there’s bigger and better stuff to feel dumb about and those guys are nice ‘n’ local and there are invisible benefits to that, so there you go.
Here’s where I am so far, and I’ve only quit for the night so I don’t bother the neighbors with drilling.
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Two out of four shelves for the DIY terraced planter.
You can basically see what’s going on here. I should really put another piece across each section close to the ground for stability, but obviously I didn’t think of that at first so I didn’t buy those pieces. There will be two more sections, shorter than these two.
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A better idea of how we'll use it.
It’ll go up against that far wall, pictured at left. I have to move the other junk.
We’re thinking we’ll get some spinach in there, some chard (at Cindy’s recommendation, it’ll probably be in the lowest tier) and the jury is out on the rest. But it’s really cool that we suddenly feel like we have a bunch more room!
Initial thoughts: I could have made the shelves closer in height. And I could use that support for these tall sections, though I sort of have a backup plan on that.
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[...] week, I’ve been putting together a little DIY terraced planter so we can maximize the sun that gets to our urban garden. It’s my way of doing an Earth Day [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] may recall that a while ago, I started working on a DIY terraced urban farm, which is my fancy-talk for four shelves on which we’re going to put [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). FIND OUT HERE [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]
[...] As it turns out, with pretty minimal effort, anyone can be a gardener. My boyfriend and I are essentially first-timers this season and so far have the beginnings of strawberries peeking out, tomatoes are on their way, the basil’s about ready for a big batch of pesto, and once the last frost hits, the peppers, kale, spinach, chard, and mesclun will be on their way, too. All on a tiiiny little terrace (with the help of a little DIY carpentry). [...]