Well, that was an accomplishment! Our “production” containers are now all filled with soil and we’ve got part of our herb garden planted! We can now start laying things out and most importantly, start planting! If you’re wondering why we go to such an extreme effort for food and flower production, let’s talk about it!
As extreme northern cold climate gardeners, our in ground soils are quite cool. Even in the summer. Things just don’t work the same way here as they do in, say, Iowa. Plants that love warm soils have a hard time growing in the ground here. In fact, we’ve seen enough with soil vs. air temperature to know that soil temperatures are far more important to deal with.
Containers reduce the amount of soil that must be heated by the sun. Plus, when you use dark colored containers like we do, that effectively attracts heat. Lower mass plus increased heat means those soils warm up faster. Plants are happier!
But, the real reason we do it is because we’re growing off grid at our homestead. We could use practically any technique or type of container for growing. But, we’ve specifically pursued a growing technology called sub irrigation. Long story short, sub irrigation is an ancient growing tech that puts soil in contact with water. The soil will then “wick” that water, effectively irrigating our plant’s roots. We’ll get more into the specifics of our container garden setup soon, it’s not a footnote!
It’s probably no secret that gardens require a lot of water. Most gardening techniques are highly inefficient with any water applied, significantly less than 50% is actually used by the plant. Not with sub irrigation, though! Nearly 100% of any applied water to such a garden is used by the plants. There is almost no water waste.
When you’re trying to grow on rain water catchment alone, water conservation like this is absolutely critical. Every drop matters! This is also the primary reason we operate a community garden. Our rain water catchment just can’t currently support the total number of plants we want to grow.
So, the primary reasons for the effort are water conservation and to achieve warmer soils. The technique also greatly assists with watering efforts too, significantly reducing the labor required to water our container gardens. That’s important when you’re running well over 140 growing containers!
