A couple of months ago I thought I’d try my hand at a vegetable garden. I know down the road that Mel and I are planning on growing our own produce to eat and, if we have more than we know what to do with, share with our community. So I had some old pickets and posts from when we built our privacy fence years ago and with a little determination, a miter saw, drill and some screws I created a raised bed one weekend while Mel was out of town. It came out great and the next week we bought seedlings in the hopes that our green thumbs would yield fifty percent of the crop we planted.

Well, things went better than expected, and it wasn’t long before our veggies were growing like crazy! This luck was a double edged sword to say the least. I mean, it was great that our veggie plants were healthy, but we also planted too much and some of the plants were choking the others out. Soooo….

It became apparent that we would have to expand! So the plan was to add another bed forming a “T” pattern that would allow us to spread out the plants and we also wanted to dabble in a little upside down tomato growing. That’s when you take your tomato plants and stick them upside down through a premade hole in the bottom of a bucket. This saves space in several ways, it gets the sprawling tomato plants out of the bed and it keeps their fruit off of the ground which can cause them to rot prematurely. What’s also cool is that you can plant smaller plants like herbs and such in the dirt at the top of the bucket creating a natural mulch for you hanging tomatoes!

So let me show you what I did. Here are my materials:

I cut off two 8 inch long pieces from the 8ft 4×4 post one for the two front corners of the expansion bed I was adding. This adds a surprising amount of stability! Also, like the last bed, I cut the the ears off of 5 dog eared fence pickets and then cut one of them in half. Stacking them lengthwise on top of each other, I drilled them into the 8 inch posts.

That done, I then had to do a fair amount of leveling of the area the new bed was going to lay on. This took a while, so if you have a good shovel and a cool day, count your blessings! If it’s hot, it’s grueling work.

Next I used four “L” braces to attach the loose ends of the expansion bed to the already established bed. It end up looking like this.

Next up was creating the beam that we would attach the hanging tomato buckets to. There are dozens of ways to do this, but I really wanted to create a situation that was customizable, so what I did is take the rest of the 4 by 4 post (which now was about 6ft tall) and I sandwiched it between two 10 foot 2×4’s. What this did was create a groove that I could create movable/slide-able bases that had hooks attached to them. After a few cuts and creating a base for the 4×4 post, I had a good sturdy, strong and stable base to hang the buckets. It’s kinda hard to explain so I’ll just show you the finished product.

I’m immensely please with how it all turned out! It’s very functional and everything I was hoping it would be!

Add in the soil and a little free harvested rain water…

…and some tomato cages for the tomatoes we couldn’t hang, and viola! Two happy suburbanite farmers in the middle of the RTP! It was a great day out in the sun and an incredibly rewarding project! Hopefully we’ll get a ton of food from it all! We’ve already started using the herbs!

Now I just have to create an irrigation (drip probably) system from my beloved rain barrel!

All in good time!

If you have any questions or if you want to know anything else about this project, please leave a comment or email me directly! I’d love to talk to you about it!

Take care,

Tad