Let’s be real – Mo has been known to kill silk plants!  Seriously!  To say she has a brown thumb is kind of understating it a bit.

Chris is great with grass but never grew veggies to survive on.

So naturally we thought growing our own food would be a great idea!

We live in a small city and rent a duplex.  So digging up the yard is not an option.  Plus the area we were planning on putting plants has been used as RV parking – so there is cement below the weedy cover.

Last year we moved right in the middle of the summer – so we got a late start on planting anything.  We purchased four City Pickers to give them a try. We had very spotty success with them.

This year we decided to start early and go all in!!  We used part of our tax return and purchased a VegTrug and containers.  Most of the containers we found in the garden area were kind of pricey and boring to look at.  However, I happened down the laundry aisle at Target and found some tubs for $5.99 that were larger and perfect.  Chris put a few holes in each with the drill and we were ready to go!!!

Next we did some research online and found a cool thing called hugelkultur and decided to give that a try with our potatoes.  Our neighbor let us raid his yard for twigs from a tree that blew down, got some blood and bone meal and compost and we were ready to go!

These are tubs we found at Target for $5.99.  Way cuter than the others we saw and they have handles.  They are 17 gallons each – so very large.  Others we saw were $25 or more for the same size.

Twigs for the bottom layer of our hugelkultur

Lots of compost

These have about 12″ of twigs on the bottom – then we layered compost, blood meal and bone meal on top the twigs.  Here you see the meals being added.  Next we added the seed potatoes and covered them with a layer of compost then a thin layer of leaves.

We are not vegetarian.  If you have issue with bone and blood meals there are alternatives.

The VegTrug and our City Pickers.  The chard was knocked down the next day.

We have the greenhouse cover on the trug.  We added some radish, beet, carrot, borage and chive seeds in the trug.
Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, squash and beans are in the containers.

We will post updates to show our progress.  We hope we gave you some inspiration to give this a try yourself!  If you have a question just leave a comment and we will get right back to you!

Please note we have not been compensated in any way by the makers/vendors of VegTrug or City Picker.  We purchased all items ourselves and the opinions in this blog are our own – they are not solicited.