The Barrel Project
(Note: I started this post just after I did this, but a month later am finally finishing this up.)
I haven’t talked too munch about my gardening adventures this spring. This is mostly because it’s too soon to tell if what I’m doing will help very much. I decided to compost all my leaves from this fall, which got my neighbors to complain to me over the fence.
Last year, despite my attempts to compost my garden, we still didn’t get much from our garden. Some small onions, a couple tomatoes, and that was about it. The problem was two-fold — an infestation of hungry rabbits in our neighborhood and the lack of sunlight in our large yet shady backyard. Both of these problems could be solved by moving our plants out of the garden into planters placed in the sunny parts of our yard.
Gina and I scouted out a couple mostly sunny parts of our yard late in the summer. But our spring was busy and I wasn’t able to find planters at the price that I wanted to. But wait! My brother and father feed cattle and they have these wide yet short plastic barrels that their feed comes in. My mom uses them in her garden for planters and some protection from the critters that live in and around their farm. When we were there for the Memorial Day weekend I was able snag some, with the hope of transplanting at least a couple tomatoes as a controlled experiment as to whether this would work or not. On the Saturday after Memorial Day, I finally had a chance to start this.
As you can see, they are pretty big — I only had room for two of them in my van to get them and all the other stuff we brought with us back home. I moved them out of the garage and went to work.
The first thing was to drill some holes in the bottom. I look my largest drill-bit (which isn’t that big) and drilled about 10-15 holes in the bottom of each one. If I would have had a larger bit, I would have drilled less holes.
Next, I needed to fill the bottom with something so I didn’t have to put so much dirt inside them. I could use sand but that would make the barrels really heavy and I would have to buy the sand. So I decided to use something that I had plenty of anyway — cardboard boxes.
Cardboard really is a good thing — it will break down, eventually. But before that it will absorb water that gets through the dirt on top before it gets to the bottom. Then, if the dirt gets dry, water should flow back into the dirt. The “cardboard as a sponge” concept comes from the research I have done with into compost.
The next step was putting in the dirt. I have a small compost pile in the garden, so I moved that and dug dirt out from where that has been sitting. The idea is that dirt would be the richest. Moving the dirt wasn’t a big deal because I have a nice wheelbarrow for this kind of work. The bad part is that it took over one wheel barrow load to fill one of the barrels. Closer to one and a third loads per barrel.
The last step was actually transplanting a couple of my tomato plants to these barrels. Not too hard — I picked two plants (one an Early Girl and the other a Fourth of July). I have another Early Girl left in the garden so that is our control to see if we really did make an improvement. I also put some leaves and grass from the top of my compost pile for mulch. This acts like a double-combo, because I’m not always good at watering and I had weeding. A decent mulch takes care of both of these problems I have
Now a month has went by. I don’t have pictures, but I will say that the feed barrels win. The Early Girl has really turned into a tomato bush and has lots of flowers plus a couple small green tomatos on it. The Fourth of July has grown tall, but it probably won’t give us tomatos by it’s namesake (because the Fourth of July is next week!). The Early Girl left in the garden is maybe a quarter of the size as her sister in the barrel with just a few blossoms on it. Success won’t be measured until we actually eat some red tomatos, though. Many times we have gotten excited about nice large green tomatoes on the vine and they never got red.