We live in a topsy-turvy world where far, far more money is spent on guns and making war than on educating children and feeding the starving, and where the richest corporations in the world have funded a successful PR campaign to paint climate scientists as money grubbers getting rich off the science of global warming. Considering this, growing a garden upside down seems somehow appropriate.
We had heard good things about growing tomatoes this way, so this spring we looked around several gardening centres for an upside down planter. When we couldn’t find any, Mark decided to make his own. Although some people recommend using 5 gallon buckets, Mark chose to fashion three planters out of empty potassium chloride bags that we already had on hand. After turning the bag inside out for aesthetic reasons and then opening both ends, he made a cuff on either end and we secured it by stitching it. At one end, he strung a stiff wire through the cuff (to keep the top end open) and then attached wires for hanging it up. At the other end, he inserted either an ice cream pail lid or a wooden circle he made to fit, with a hole in the centre, and stapled it to the plastic after getting the tomato plant in place. This is the final product:
I’m not convinced that this is the look I want on our front deck this summer, although Mark says from the road they look like decorative lanterns! And if we have lots of fresh tomatoes from them this summer, I will probably be convinced that they are beautiful.
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