Well, now the hard work really begins! We’ve begun the preparation of our container gardens! With over 140 containers to be filled with soil, this is no short or easy task!
A lot of people probably have the view that container gardening is easier than “regular” gardening. Up to a point, that might be true. But, as well practiced container gardeners, we’d probably disagree. At scale, it involves moving cubic yards of soil every season. Which, we’ll tell you, is a lot of physical effort!
Fortunately, over the years, we’ve developed some tricks to make it easier. For example, using our ATV and trailer to transport everything to and from where we fill our containers. We also generally have a good system in place, one that minimizes movement and reduces physical effort.
Our task involves not just filling the containers, but also refreshing the soil in them. We do this the “easy way” by just adding a couple inches of compost into each container, as we are filling them with our
re-used container garden soil. We’ll talk more about our soil storage and the containers we’re using in coming days.
The goal at this point is to fully minimize the number of plants that we have in our greenhouse. Since we have a little over 30 of these containers going into the greenhouse, we now need the room! But, a lot of our containers do remain on our deck, a preferred place for general moose and rabbit protection.
This is one of the reasons we love container gardening. Anywhere can be a garden! It can be wood, concrete or gravel and it’ll make a functional garden! We definitely like integrating physical infrastructure that gives us natural protection from plant predators.
Our container gardens always take us a couple of days of solid work. It’s physical enough that we can’t just power through, so we break it up into two more reasonable chunks. We’ll be back at filling our containers again tomorrow, then it’s a mad dash to plant all of them! So stoked, it’s all coming together!
