A Blog-By-A-Dog

Plastic Container Garden

We've set up our plastic garden containers to be self-watering following the plans we found online.  Ugly as they are, they're cheap and fairly easy to build.  We'll soon see how well this container garden works. The goal is less work for the humans, no work for the dog (except for writing this blog, which can be done from a safe distance here on the porch, under the fan).

Container Potting Soil Mix

The ingredients for our container potting soil mix will be:

• Compost from our outdoor worm beds, which is a mix of composted horse manure and peat moss.  The worms are fed a diet of fresh horse manure.  After the worms are removed, you have a wonderful mix of partially composted peat moss and horse manure with worm castings.  It's arable, holds water, and is full of microbes.
• To the worm compost, we add 20% Pure Black Castings®.  The ratio of Pure Black Castings® to compost is -
  with VermaPlex®:        10# Pure Black Castings® to 90# compost; 
  without VermaPlex®:   20# Pure Black Castings® to 80# compost.
• Perilite

We will not at any more fertilizer to this mix.  Our plants will get all they need from the worm compost, Pure Black Castings®, and VermaPlex®.

All these ingredients are dumped into a wheel barrel and mixed thoroughly.  After that's done, the potting soil mix needs to be  moistened. That is, moist but not soggy wet.  This planting mix was allowed to sit and absorb the moisture throughout and then transferred into the plastic garden containers.

Since we have such strong sun here in Florida,  we'll add either a plastic cover or straw mulch to the surface of the potting soil mix, around the plants, which will conserve water and help keep our vegetable container garden cool. 

Next.... Planting, Watering Our Vegetable Container Garden

But first, I'm heading for that water hose. Gotta keep this blogging dog cool.

	Pure   Black Castings	Vermicomposting        Bins	Compost Worms	VermaPlex