The Garden Tower Project
For fun and, you know, the apocalypse and stuff
Hey, there veg-heads! I warned you this post would be “a little late” but I did not intend it to be a two whole days late. And yet, here we are. Apologies. Life happens.
But I thought you might enjoy following along with our maiden effort with the new Garden Tower II, made by a small, family-owned business in the US, and goodness knows those need all the help they can get! I’ve been wanting one of these since I first started seeing them advertised, and this year I saved up enough to get one when they were on sale.
Why?
Because the closer to the ground we eat, the better. That is, the less time between the plant being in the ground, and the plant being in your belly, the healthier you will be. Especially if you fertilize with compost instead of manure, and do not use chemical insecticides. And if you can grow heirloom veggies, maybe healthier still, although the cross-breeding of different varieties creates hybrid plants that might produce be healthier and more produce. However cross-breeding and GMO are two different processes. Cross breeding is like you take a poodle and a bulldog, and they mate, and you get… a boodle? GMO, on the other hand would be like adding some fish DNA to your bulldog so they can swim. Mixing a “big red” tomato with a “little darling” tomato still produces a tomato. Mixing fish DNA into your tomato makes it, in my mind, not a tomato.
Also note that every government agency focused on food safety in the United States has been decimated, if not entirely shut down, by the current regime. This means eating store-bought groceries is like playing Russian roulette. When you have to, remember the less processed the better, and wash it like you just plucked it out of something nasty.
About the Garden Tower
It’s a stacked garden, as you can see from the image. (That is not what mine looks like, YET.) It has multiple levels with 50 openings for plants. The center column is for composting, and if you want, even earthworms. If you add worms, you do not need compost starter or booster to get things underway. After the initial soil fill, the Garden tower makes new soil and fertilizes everything growing, all by itself. As the compost processes it sifts its way into a drawer in the base, and you just take the drawer out, empty it into the top of the tower, and replace the drawer.
The only extras required are light and water. In summer, I think will get plenty of light outside, and we’ll supplement with light bars we’ll purchase separately when we bring it inside for the winter months and continue growing on the front porch.
It comes in three packages, each one for a little bit more money. The basic edition is just the planter itself, the middle edition adds casters so you can move the thing around more easily (it’ll be heavy AF when full,) and the premium edition throws in a lot of other extras, like plant food, a gift certificate for seeds, some plant stakes, stuff like that.
We wanted the casters, so we upgraded only to that level. All the little extras in the packages above that one were things I could find cheaper at Lowe’s. The site also offers other accessories.
There’s a perpetual $35 off coupon. I’ve been looking at this for a year and have never seen it without that coupon offer. However, after my purchase, I received a $40 off coupon I hadn’t seen before, either because I’d bought, or because I was visiting the site so often to verify my details for this piece. So maybe buy the unit first, and the accessories a little bit later, in case you have a coupon on its way.
The shopping experience
I have to tell you their website is phenomenal. I don’t know who built it for them but it’s great, and the graphics are wonderful too. They do a great job explaining how their planter works. I’ll link at the bottom. BTW, I’m not an affiliate or anything like that, but if they have a program I might apply to be. So far, I’m just a customer and a fan.
I did find it irritating that there wasn’t a way to track my order on their site. They don’t have any way to register, and then sign in later, like most sites do. However, they shipped it so fast, I barely had time to notice this and email them about it. I ordered on a Friday and it shipped out on Monday or Tuesday. Really fast!
Here’s what you see when you open the 25-inch tall, octagonal box. The sheet on top is suggestions on what veggies should go on which levels.
Thought bubble: What if you had a whole unit just for strawberries? You could give or sell or barter the extras to friends & neighbors!
All the parts stack together for ease of shipping. Brilliant design, really.
It went together easily and quickly. A little too quickly, as we made one mistake which I’ll tell you about so you don’t make it, too. There are instructional videos to watch and they send you links to them before the package arrives. Save those.
Assembly
After unpacking, the first step was to flip the base upside down and attach the casters. They’re braced by metal cross-pieces that are heavy duty as all get out. Quality parts here, the casters too, super rugged. The brace gives the entire thing extra stability and it would need it, because that dirt, with water, will be heavy.
With the casters attached, it was a simple matter of flipping the base upright, and stacking the inner and outer rings, alternating them as you go.
Here was where I made my mistake. One of the inner rings is solid, while all the rest have holes. I didn’t notice that until we’d already half filled it with soil, so we had to take out two layers of dirt and fix that error. But that’s just because I was in a hurry to get this blog up (and it wound up two days late, so you can see how much good hurrying does!)
So remember: The solid section of the inner composting column goes on top!
Speaking of soil my hubs is a bit of a dirt expert, and Fox Farm brands are his favorites. They’re also carried locally. We filled the entire unit with potting soil, not garden soil. That’s important.
Also note, start adding water when you’ve filled the soil 1/3 of the way, then again at 2/3rds, and again when it’s full.
Ours is all assembled and holding court on the enclosed front porch that will one day become a sunroom/greenhouse, as finances allow. We ran a little short of dirt. That’s because the instructions list 6 cubic feet as the required amount, and for some reason all the manufacturers now their potting soil contents in quarts. WTAF? Quarts? Who measures dirt in quarts?
So we need a few more bags to top it off.
Here it is as finished as we could finish this very busy weekend. Next weekend, we’ll go get more dirt, pick up the lights, and finish up. Stem to Stern it stands about 50” tall, all put together with casters and the cap in place atop the center column.
Also underway…
We also assembled and filled this above-ground plant bed. It was a Mother’s Day gift from my girls. Our home is on a 5-acre lot in the country, and I have two lovely tiered, raised beds out back. However, last year chipmunks literally made their burrows underneath the raised beds. Every plant I put in was promptly and thoroughly eaten. Strawberry plants in the bottom row survived, but they ate the berries faster than they could ripen.
We’re vegans. We don’t kill animals if we can help it. We regret even the small numbers who die in commercial farming. Our philosophy is to cause as little suffering to our fellow beings and our planet as possible. So we don’t use insecticides either.
The chipmunk’s life, or the insect’s life is everything to her. It’s her whole existence. She has friends, she has family, she has plans and intentions, and she enjoys living — more than most humans, really. Humans waste time worrying. Animals are always in the moment. If the value of life were based on how well one lives it, animals lives would be far more valuable than humans’. Murder feels the same to them as it feels to you or I.
So I can’t kill the chipmunks. I can cuss them out, and frequently do. We might grab a couple more of those above-ground beds, which are way more affordable than the Garden Tower, while I research what I can plant in my in-ground gardens that the chipmunks will not like.
The goals
Ultimately I’d like to grow most of what we consume. I don’t think it’s realistic right at this moment in our lives to shoot for growing all of it. A year’s worth of peas, corn, and potatoes would take more space than we have, and more time than we have. At this point, we both still have to work to earn a living. If the whole system collapses, that’ll be a different story, and all of us will need to spend nearly all our time living off the land, as we were designed to do, when it comes down to it.
Initially, my thought was that the Garden Tower would be all greens. Because reversing plaque build up from coronary arteries (I have a little bit) takes multiple servings of green leafies and cruciferous vegetables daily. So we eat a lot of greens. However, this tower is so big in person, I realize even we couldn’t eat that many. But I’m planting a lot of them, all the same.
I have a seed starter tray, you know the plastic ones with the cover? It’s been in the basement for years and I forgot I had it. So I have added the water to expand the peat pods, and I’ll be starting 70 seeds today—well, 210 really because it says to put 3 seeds in each pod.
I’m not sure exactly what I’m planting yet. But for the greens, I know I want to spread out the planting by a few weeks, so when the first batch is playing out, a new batch is ready to harvest, overlapping, never leaving us leafless (see what I did, there?) and eliminating entirely our weekly purchases of green leafies from elsewhere.
For the big outdoor container I think I’m doing straight up tomatoes in that one. My second huge gardening goal for this year is to can about 104 quarts of tomatoes, which is my estimate of what we’d need for a year. I want to grow as many as I can and I can, and I’ll buy the rest by the bushel.
So those are the immediate goals for this season. Fresh greens year round. A year’s worth of tomatoes. I think that’s enough to get me started. I used to raise just about everything my five kids and I ate, but that was long ago, and it’s been a minute.
Going forward
This year, I’d like at least two more of the outdoor raised beds. Next year, if it goes as well as I think it will and finances allow, I’ll add a second garden tower.
Meanwhile, I’m going to experiment with my in-ground tiered beds and see what I can grow there that the chipmunks won’t eat.
In future seasons, two more gigantic goals. These are really for my talented and in-demand spouse.
The front porch converted into a greenhouse/sunroom It needs real windows as opposed to single-pane porch windows, fresh insulation, a new ceiling, and bit of wiring.
A root cellar. In those old days when I grew everything, the carrots, parsnips, turnips, onions, potatoes, and big winter squash like blue hubbards, would last most of the winter in my cellar. Beets would even last a good long time. But my cellar today is too warm for veggies to keep. So I want an external, partly below ground concrete root cellar with easy access from the house so I’m not stomping through snow to get to it.
Okay, I’m off to start the seeds. I’ll tell you what I planted as soon as I get them started, and I’ll try not to be so late with a post again. (They’re supposed to land every Saturday morning by 7 a.m.
Here’s that link to the Garden Tower site.
See you next time!
In springtime, our thoughts turn to…
ROMANTASY
Hidden in the mortal realm, half fae twins must reunite to save their kingdom.
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