Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Bottle Herb Farm


More soda bottle planters - for thyme, rosemary and oregano. Plan is to let them grow in these for a while, then transplant to SIP-converted clay pots. I had rosemary and thyme indoors this winter in clay pots (drench & drain, both from last summer)...but mistakenly put them out on the balcony and forgot the whole hardening process, and they haven't quite recovered from the shock of fresh air.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is seriously inspiring. I am not super DIY in general, but I think I'm going to copy you on this bottle thing. Did you follow urbangreen guy's directions? (I just clicked through a flickr tutorial). do you have a special wood cutting pen?

Chris said...

I can be DIY, but usually I laze-out on things...so I can tell you this is really easy. The hardest thing for me is getting a hold of 2l bottles since we generally don't consume beverages that are sold in them. I'm sure it would be safer (read: no use of physical force with tools having the ability to pierce skin) to use the tools urbangreen recommends in the flickr tutorial; lacking those I used an awl to punch holes and a small swiss army blade to cut the bottles in two. Too impatient to boil water (and how green would that be? ;) so found that really hot tap water dissolves the adhesive on most bottle labels. Until I can get out into civilization to find longer-lasting poly batting for the wick, I nicked some cotton balls from the missus. Oh, and for figuring out where to cut, though urbangreen seems to recommend Swanson chicken broth, I found a can of muir glen tomatoes for the marker and the March 2009 issue of National Geographic placed underneath the bottle works out perfectly. Good luck!