Do you ever walk around your garden, harvest, weed, plant, tool around, but not really see certain aspects of what’s happening?
I do. It happened with yesterdays horn worms and it happened with our pallet beds.
I was sitting on our back porch (I do this a lot) and suddenly realized that our pallet beds are doing really well! Who knew?
Now, everything’s pretty overgrown, so it might be hard to tell from this picture, but…while there is nothing growing in the blue pallet bed (I never sowed any seeds there), there is a lot growing in the red and yellow pallet beds!
If you recall, these were both planted out pretty late, so everything’s a bit behind, but we have cucumbers, swiss chard, some bush beans and nasturtiums that are all doing really well!
One thing I’ve noticed is that the cucumbers seem happier to trail down the pallets instead of holding on to the wire trellis we created for them, but that’s OK as long as they keep producing 🙂 On Friday I harvested four Lemon Cukes from the pallet bedss! Not too shabby!
This mild success has me thinking about a personal challenge next year…
I wonder how many pounds of veggies could be grown in a single pallet? Two pallet beds? Three pallet beds? Hmmm…sounds like fun to me!
…As long as I can get it all planted out in time 😉
xoxo,
M
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Wow, that’s awesome – looks like the pallet idea was wildly successful! I’m about to get started putting mine together, but I got tripped up yesterday as I was doing a little research and came across quite a few articles cautioning against using salvaged wood pallets due to the chemicals they are often treated with and other nasty contaminants they tend to pick up, and also some commentary about how those “scare articles” are exaggerated (PR for the plastic pallet industry), and to clean them thoroughly and seal them. When you originally built your pallet containers, did you (or Tool Lady?) paint the inside (as well as the outside) and bleach them first?
I’ve heard such things as well and try to be careful but realistic about it all. We did not paint/seal the inside of the pallets. didn’t even think about it, honestly. While I know there is a risk of certain toxins seeping into our veggies from such recycled materials, I generally chalk it up to the fact that we’re still doing better by recycling and growing our own veggies than all the madness involved in general ag. processes + transportation, etc. However, when we grow using anything that might be questionable, we do NOT grow root veggies. The theory is that the root system of non-root veggies will do it’s job and help filter out anything nasty that’s trying to seep in. It’s such a balancing act sometimes, and one we’re still learning about as we go 🙂
That’s my inclination about it too – thanks!!
This was a really neat idea and I love that it’s working. It gives me some ideas for the expansion of our backyard growing.
Yay! I love the spread of ideas 🙂
That would be interesting to see!
I try never to notice how things are doing, because if I see they’re doing well, they will decide suddenly not to do well anymore. I think it’s to spite me. 🙂
Ha! Isn’t that always the way? 😉