New planters, heyyy!
By (astoundingly) popular request via IG, today’s post is about…my planters. It turns out that everyone in the world has decided to become a gardener in their abundance of spare time.
I have, in the course of my years, proven myself to be an astoundingly poor keeper of indoor plants. When you see a lovely, thriving plant in my house, be assured: It is fake. But for whatever reason my black thumb turns green (or, ok, perhaps something more like chartreuse) in the presence of vegetables: In our San Jose house, our tomatoes and cucumbers were actual legend. I never bothered to garden in our last place because 1) I was kinda in crisis last year and tomatoes were not my priority, and 2) I wasn’t inclined to put even more work into a rental place than I already had (and I’d already done a lot).
Anyway, I’m still in a rental, but now I’m fully leaning in to all those activities that used to sound tedious but now sound like an excellent time-filler. Weeding the front yard? That’s an entire weekend of Stuff To Do!
Alright, you came here because you wanted to know about the planter, so I’ll put a pin in it. This is the planter I bought, and it’s excellent: Sturdy, roomy, and easy to put together – all you need is a Phillip’s head screwdriver (and a pair of gloves, preferably – there’s quite a lot of screwing involved, and I have a very blistered right hand at the moment).
Now, I’ll go ahead and answer a few questions you guys had on IG:
- What’s the black fabric thing? It came with the planter – it’s a plastic liner that keeps the wood separate from the soil. This helps the wood stay in good condition, and also keeps weeds and bugs and such from getting into the soil.
- How much soil do you need? I used about 1 1/2 bags (each bag had 1.5 cubic feet) per planter, so the soil comes up to about 2″ below the top of the planter.
- How many plants do you put in each planter? It depends. Some plants, like tomatoes, can get really big and will basically push out other plants, so I stuck to just four tomato plants and gave them their own planter. The other planter has six onion plants, two cucumber plants (which also will probably creep over the edge of the planter and overflow down the sides, but that’s OK), and six mustard green plants. I’ve never grown onions or mustard greens before, but I eyeballed the spacing and it seemed good to me.
- Where do you put the planters? I shoot for an area that gets full sun for at least part of the day – but not all day, because once it gets hot that’ll be too much for them.
And there you go! Let us all now learn to live off the land.
