Garden 2013 part?

I made another step forward in Project Thinking Outside the Garden . I brought my pallets home!

It wasn't easy, they were free which is nice and  all, but even "small" pallets are heavy, bulky, and oddly shaped. Not to mention filthy and splinter factories. The ecstatic nature of most of the How To videos and tutorials tend to gloss over that part. And there is no mention at all about getting those heavy, dirty, oddly shaped things into your car, over lunch, dressed for work.

There is some mention of the need to "sand a little" and that the pallets will be heavy after they are kitted out into planters - in reality, they are heavy before too and you sand blast them and you would still need gloves to handle them. They are also really, really big, even the "small" ones I pulled, they are bigger and heavier than I had anticipated.

I don't care! I'm going to do this. I am going to need to score a heavy duty stapler though and probably invest in a better quality weed barrier than I normally buy, but it'll be worth it in the end I think, if it works the way they promise it will.

I was starting to doubt that my potatoes were going to work out. I planted the first batch at the same time I planted last year and they froze and I had to start over. Today I found my first sprout. Considering I have a lot of them in the bins, one sprout is really not quite the outcome I am looking for, hopefully it will warm up soon and my spuds will get with the program.

There are two there, the smaller one I think is going to be flowers and it is going to live on the front deck, the larger is going to be strawberries and herbs. These are not a cheap way of gardening, you plant very densely in order to hold in the dirt with their root growth, so what ever I end up planting I am going to have a lot of it. I haven't decided what herbs I'm going to use, but I'm pretty sure its going to be "all of them" and I will start researching recipes for strawberries.  The flowers are going to be easier, pretty much anything that drapes and flows and there are a lot of varieties that will do quite beautifully. Its going to be work getting them set up but I think its going to be worth the extra effort. The tutorials tell me so.



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