More Planter Boxes

Now I'm trying to upgrade my planter boxes.  I showed you, many many posts ago, the second-hand planters I'd gotten from my parents.

Old planter from my parents -- wood has rotted pretty badly

My brick pathway behind my house has planter areas -- the planter boxes were free,
but too small for the planter area, so I filled the excess area around the boxes with rocks

What we did today was remove one of those old planters, that was against the garage, and replace it with a new planter that fit tight to the bricked in area.

Here we pulled out the old planter, and removed the rocks that were filler, left
the two plants that were there originally

Here's the start of a pile of rocks

We used red fence wood to build the box, and we (meaning the husband) built it to be the exact size of the planter area.  Now no need for rocks!  The rocks weren't the best solution for filler, they let the weeds grow in pretty badly and required lots of maintenance.

New planter box that fits the space perfectly.

You can see in the picture above that I had two nice green bean plants that are still going.  The reason there were only two green bean plants in a rather large area is because I planted 6 but only 2 germinated.  I didn't bother, to try to replant additional seeds.  I just got lazy.  Anyway, so we just kept those in the ground (since they still are producing beans), and then we spread a mixture of compost, pete moss, and perlite around them to fill in the rest of the area -- since this planter box is now much bigger than the old planter box.

If I use the square foot gardening method on this box I'll have 5 square foot gardens to work with because the box we built was 5' by 16"...  I'll just say the 16" rounds to 12" :)  Using the square foot gardening method I'll plant quite a few green beans in this area now.

This is the one area in my yard that I have to water by hand, as there are no sprinklers near it.  Well, that's not true, I also have to water my vertical plant stands that I have now.