Strawberry Garden - Upcycle Style

Today's blog came about from me chatting on facebook about my making a strawberry wall and a few people asking me questions about it. This reminded me of one of the reasons I was doing this blog to begin with, to share some of the projects of our garden with others.

Last summer we bought 4 strawberry plants, to say they went wild is an understatement we ended up with 40 odd plants!!

This is them after we dug them all up.

So it was time to think of a way to grow them without taking up so much room, remembering that by next season we will have even more plants for next season, so we needed an idea we can repeat as this space will also soon be full. I did some searching and came across strawberry walls made of pallets, they looked great once established and as you know we love to reuse old pallets etc so sounded perfect to me :)

So you take a pallet I picked a nice solid one and we put a board on the back to hold the soil in. You can use weed matting or whatever else you have around to upcycle. 

Close off one end of the pallet with a bit of wood from another pallet, this will stop the soil falling out the bottom. On the top put another bit of wood in place, this is only in place while the wall is laying flat and will be removed later so don't go overboard nailing it on.

Lay the pallet on the ground flat near to where you are planning on putting it once finished as once filled with soil it will be REALLY heavy and hard to move.

Start planting your strawberry plants and give a good watering. 

I watered mine with some seasol to help give them a boost.

The finished product should look something like this. This needs to stay flat for aprox 6weeks to the roots time to get established and hold the soil in place.

In 6 weeks time I should be able to stand my strawberry wall up and remove the wood from the top and either plant more strawberry plants in the top or other plants of choice. 

I'll be sure to update once its established and standing up and hopefully with flowers!

aus.keeys

Pallets.....and other recycled materials

We wanted to have a backyard vegie garden for a few reasons -

• save money - I was sick of paying stupid prices for some of the easiest things to grow eg lettuce
• to encourage our youngest non vegie eating child to be interested and try things he helped to grow
• spend time together as a family doing something that benefits all of us - health and money wise
• learning how to preserve or freeze our produce so we have for the months its not in season
• to share with family and friends

 What I didn't want was to spend a fortune on setting it all up, it seemed to defeat the saving money part or the idea. Of course some things you have to spend money on there is no choice but where there is a choice, another option we have tried to do that. 

first pallet garden

The original garden bed was built with wood from a couple of pallets and filled with the manure, straw etc from a big clean out of the chicken coop. We left it for months and months to see how it would go in the weather.

This is the latest photo of this garden from a few weeks back.

The next garden game pretty much ready made, a HUGE pallet that had garden written all over it as soon as I saw it!

We filled it with manure from a friends cattle property that had been sitting around for about 6mths along with straw.

This garden now houses the zucchini and cucumbers which are growing like MAD! 

It was about this time we started thinking about needing compost and how we could build a compost bin so we by next spring would have some of our own. This would save money in not having to take green waste to the tip and not having to buy additives to boost the soil quality. I started researching and found all sorts of bins some cost alot of money and some we just slapped together but the end product was the same. I found a website that talked about a pallet compost bin which given I had pallets on hand grabbed my attention. After a few hours work this is what we ended up with .......

 

Its just pallets, chicken wire and a few brackets. The brackets were the only thing we had to buy to build it and cost us $12! We are slowly adding material to it and learning what we can and can't put on the heap. 

We look forward to next spring having our own compost to add to our gardens when preparing them for the spring/summer crops.

The next two gardens made were from another idea I'd seen and knew we had the materials for in the yard. Both these gardens used old roof tin and timber a neighbour had given us a few weeks earlier when moving house.We had run out of soil so went and bought some garden soil for this lot from the local tip at the cost of $100, yep thats $100 worth of dirt your looking at!

Our newest garden beds were built just yesterday.....yep we had gardening day, instead of boxing day. The garden beds are similar to the first bed we built of pallets.

We decided to build one not as deep as the other we will just be careful what we plant in it. 

This is the shorter bed with a layer of straw in the bottom, we just need to get some more soil. I already have some seedlings ready to go in. 

If anything I've learnt there is no point direct sowing as the rate isn't nearly as good as having them in the mini green houses and then moving when big enough. 

These mini green houses are my favourite, I have 3 of them and have a much better rate with them than anything else I've tried so far.

                                                       I planted out this corn today.

The most expensive thing in our garden so far apart from the $100 soil has been the tomato stakes but we figure we will get our money out of them over the next few years. 

I still think we will recoup our outlay in 6mths or so, its amazing how quickly the savings add up, we haven't had to buy lettuce in 2mths, we get enough beans for dinner a few nights a week, we have had our first few cucumbers, bok choi for stir fries for the past 2mths, spinach a few nights a week for 2mths, aprox 8kg of zucchinis and a capcicum. All this in just 2.5mths not bad at all!

aus.keeys

From the begining - Vegetable Garden Setup

I've wanted a vegetable garden for the past few years, the problem was we LOVE our hens having free run of the yard and vegetables and chickens don't mix as you can imagine! This spring I decided it was time to find a solution, so after hours at looking at other peoples websites and blogs to see what they had come up with I decided on just sectioning off some of the yard. We had some timber laying around so bought the chicken wire and started on our way. Work started mid October.

The posts going in

Wire up and door on.

The bales are to use as mulch, for the animals and the compost bins, we got a good discount buying in bulk, just $3 a bale. This our first garden bed. It was made months go using wood from old pallets, we filled it with everything from the chickens last time we did a BIG clean up of their pen. It had been sitting about 6mths just waiting for the big day. So the day finally came and we planted 3 tomato plants, 8 capsicum and 6 lettuce. We were so excited!! 

Hayden grew some pumpkin plants from the seeds he'd kept back a few months earlier and proudly planted them in the corner of the yard.

This was the next project, to turn this old pallet into a vegetable garden.

We also put in some strawberries.












Over the next few weeks we saw some AMAZING changes in the garden and were able to start being rewarded for our efforts. We have had a few handfuls of beans, lots of lettuce and bok choi and a couple of strawberries. This is in just 8 weeks!!

The pumpkins went from this too...

this in just a few weeks!! The pumpkin is starting to flower although no sign of fruit as yet.

 We filled it and prepared it for zucchini and cucumbers we had grown from seed we bought off ebay. In just 5 weeks it went from the first picture to the second picture.

We now have a few zucchini's growing and in the next week or 2 we should be enjoying a steady supply. The cucumber is just starting to flower.

The original garden which I now know I over planted took off!! Look at those tomato plants!! The lettuce was so nice we had 8 weeks from them before I pulled them out to give everything else in the garden more room.  We have our first fruit just starting on the tomato plants and the capsicum is just starting to flower.

 We dug up some more ground and put in 8 cherry tomato plants. The soil must be ok because within just 3 weeks we went from this too .....

This!! It was like they grew overnight. They are now covered in flowers and it won't be long before we are enjoying them.

The strawberries are growing really well and from what I've read we won't get much in the way of fruit off them this year as they are busy growing but next season all the waiting should pay off....I hope!

The beans are growing well as is the bok choi and we've already enjoyed some of the rewards from both of these crops. We have just put in more beans as some of the first seeds didn't grow so filled in the gaps with new plants and they are growing nicely.

Its corn grown from seed we bought off ebay. There is sweet corn, pop corn and baby corn, I was so excited when it grew and can't wait to watch this grow. I plan on planting more beans in this bed and using the corn as trellis for it to climb up. I can't believe I'm excited over corn...I don't even eat the stuff hehe!

Last but not least - these are the two latest garden beds. I've only started these in the past week. We had to buy this soil after running out, $100 for the trailer load. It will be interesting to see how the plants go in it.

I've panted capsicum and egg plant as seedlings and lettuce, shallots, silver beet, beetroot and baby spinach seeds. In a few weeks we will hopefully see a totally different garden.


We have some new pallets in so over the next few weeks we should get some more new garden beds up and running. I've planted a heap of seeds that just arrived from ebay into our mini green house seed raisers so as soon as the new beds are ready I'll have seedlings to pop straight in.

We have got alot done in just 8 short weeks, it seems the garden is changing every day. Its raining again this after noon and the plants are loving it, it seems they almost double in size after the rain.

aus.keeys