Here's my dear little Wola modeling my potato bin. All I did really today was put a third panel on the back side of the 2 bins, and I built my third one. I've pretty much decided to just do 18" deep bins, I'll plant the potatoes at 6" and then hill them another 12" and see what happens. Each bin is 2.5' square so that should give me almost 19 square feet of growing space.According to square foot gardening rules, I can plant one potato plant per square foot. I'll probably end up with 5 plants per box, for a total of 15 plants. I think that'll give them plenty of room.
So here you can see the complete garden. I still need to finish putting cardboard under all the beds but my wood chip mulch is taking it's sweet time so no rush on that. I've got almost 160 square feet of growing space there! This will be really fun to plan out, I think. I'll probably have to wait until the spring so I can watch sun patterns better. Also, my neighbor offered to let me use his pruning saw if I want to cut out some of the branches of the tree that shade the north part of the garden, so I might take him up on that offer. I won't prune too much, just a little bit to open up more sunshine.
Here's the sides of my third potato bin ,all laid out on the brick of my patio and waiting to be drilled & screwed together, assembly-line style. They go together really quickly. I decided to add the back panel on the other bins (and this one I made with a back panel) so that when it came time to add on the top row, part of it would already be done. I like to make things easy for myself and I figure it's probably a lot easier to do it now than it will be once they have plants in them.
The other reason is that 2 of the potato bins are right next to the brick wall of the patio (you can see it pretty well in the picture) and so I figure I won't be able to reach that wall to get the side in securely, so if I put it in now would be better. I don't want to make them 3 panels high all the way around just yet, mainly because I'm going to plant 6" deep and I don't want the sides to shade the plants too much while they are little.
Eleora looooooves her pumpkin. She carried it around all afternoon and even gave it kisses and hugs. lol
