Okay, I am a penny pincher - always have been and always will be.
I do not like to spend money nor do I like to shop for extravagant things. Not that there is anything wrong with people who do shop and spend money, it's just not something I enjoy doing.
When it came time to plant my garden this year, I wanted raised beds. Because over the past five years, planting directly into our clay-laden soil produced water-logged results for most of our vegetable plants. This year will be different, I kept telling myself and I got the hubs to agree to make some planter boxes for a raised bed garden.
Now, if you want brand new wooden planter boxes or use four-by-four landscape timbers, it costs quite a bit. But, I wanted plastic frames. I actually found a company that makes them ... for hundreds of dollars each. The tightwad in me could not fathom that kind of money on something that was just going to get dirt thrown in it.
After relenting and comprising on the wooden version of a planter box, the price tag on ten frames would have been a mortgage payment ... back to square one.
While perusing some old white vinyl fencing that we had stacked in the barn, my husband came up with a brilliant idea. From that brainstorm, we went about building a scaled down model of a planter box made out of the white vinyl fence posts. We thought it looked good and was sturdy enough, so we filled it with topsoil.
Then we got on a roll and made six regular-sized planter frames and then a double height frame for root vegetables.
This was the end result:
It has been a few weeks since we planted and we have had some torrential rains during that time. But, the plants are surviving and thriving in the raised beds. Come to find out it only takes a few inches of soil above the flood plain to keep a plant from drowning. The corn plants really have taken off being in raised beds:
What's in your garden this year? Do you have raised beds or a normal garden? Do you re-purpose things on your farm? Tell me all about it.
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