Creative Gardening Containers: Leave No Bin Unplanted

When your yard is small, yet you want to have some fresh greens and vegetables on your dining table, an obvious answer is container gardening. With unlimited funds for a variety of expensive garden boxes, pots and grow bags, it would be easy to increase your yield despite the size constraint. But, if you are not in the market for an expensive solution, you need only gaze around your home and yard to find materials to re-purpose into your movable feast.

Just this summer, I retired a twenty five year old wheelbarrow. Remarkably deep, the contraption was missing one wheel and sagging after the years of ferrying compost, leaves and kids wanting autumn rides around the yard and down the alley. It is made of recycled plastic, so it seemed inappropriate to lean it against the trash bin after the brand new replacement yard cart arrived and was assembled. About the same time the wheelbarrow was pensioned off, I was contemplating where to put the vigorous, yet fragile, cucumber plants this year. If I plant them in the same place each year, the cucumber beetles feast. The old wheelbarrow is still kind of portable, if you push it slanted toward the good wheel. Inside my brain, other wheels started turning, and before you knew it, I had drilled a number of drainage holes in the bottom, and had located the old wheelbarrow in a fenced in corner of the yard, where the chain links just begged a vine to cling.

A bag of good container soil and a little compost filled the sturdy bed of the wheelbarrow, and it was ready for a sprinkling around the edge of pale oval cucumber seeds. I added a couple of sweet peppers that needed a home, and then I was dreaming of healthy vines filled with green cukes for those jars of pickles my boys and their friends demand throughout the winter.

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