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We have a gardening extravaganza going on today! So much good gardening stuff! I’m sharing the instructions for how to make our Easy DIY Planter Box (which takes an hour or less to make), sharing with you all the awesome stuff we’ve planted in our garden from the Garden Therapy Kids’ Gardening Kit and doing a giveaway for a Garden Therapy Get Growing Ebook! Read on for all the good stuff!
I love gardening. My garden is my happy place. I love watching the bees, butterflies and dragonflies flit from plant to plant. I love checking on the plants each morning to see how everything is growing. I ADORE harvesting and enjoying the fruits of our labour. My kids have been gardening with us since they were babies and love helping us choose what we are going to plant, watching them grow and of course getting to eat what we pick from our garden.
We had a plot at our community garden since Bean was a baby, but made the decision to give it up this past year and focus on our own backyard garden. I knew that we needed to increase our backyard gardening space and since we have a small patio below our deck that already had planter boxes around the edges it seemed like the perfect idea to take over the patio area as well for growing.
Having our garden at home is wonderful because it ensures that our whole family can have daily access to the garden and really get to enjoy it. We all have roles in our garden’s creation and upkeep.
Family Garden Roles:
The Hubs- Builder, soil preparer, weeder
Me- Planner, planter, harvester
Kids- Help decide what to plant, help plant, occasional weeders, harvesters
Who waters you ask? For years we watered our back area by hand, but two years ago I had my husband install a self watering system. It saves so much time and ensures that our plants are being watered enough and with consistency so that we have great results.
As the plants have grown bigger we occasionally need to go in, adjust the sprinklers and water certain areas by hand, but it’s so much easier not having to water the entire garden.
This year my family got some special help for what to plant in our garden from my good friend Steph at Garden Therapy. Together with Garden Trends, Steph has developed a line of garden kits that is perfect for every experience level of gardener from beginner to advanced.
Steph gave us her Kids’ Gardening Kit to test out as a family in our garden along with starts from some of her other kits to attract bees and pollinators to our beds. (Please note in 2018 this kit is only available in the US but they are hoping to expand to Canada in 2019).
The kit comes with the seeds for 9 incredible plants that kids will love to plant, watch grow, harvest and eat. They include:
- Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherries (Physalis spp.) seeds
- Lil Pump-Ke-Mon Pumpkin (Cucurbita spp.) seeds
- Baby Bottle Gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) seeds
- Dragon Tongue Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) seeds
- Candyland Red Tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) seeds
- Candy Cane Red Pepper (Capsicum annuum) seeds
- Parisian Carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus) seeds
- Cucamelon (Melothria scabra) seeds
Each kit also comes with a carry bag with a trowel, mini rake, hand fork, and watering can. The seed packs are all mini coloring sheets that your kids can color. I think it would be super fun for the kids color the seed packs with their prediction of what the veggies are going to look like once ripened and return to them later in the season to see if their predictions are correct.
I love that through gardening my kids are learning about what “real food” is, where food comes from and how important it is to take care of the earth and our pollinating friends.
It’s not too late to buy the Garden Therapy Kids’ Gardening Kit and to put it to good use this summer! Steph shared an article on Garden Therapy about seeds that you can sow in summer for fall harvest and many of them are from this kit!
Thanks to Steph we had the plants we needed, but where were we going to plant them all? My husband and I went back and forth about how to build our planter box. What we ended up deciding on ended up being such a fabulous and simple idea that I knew I had to share it. This DIY Planter Box was simple to make and required no power tools, can be made as big or as small as you would like it to be in and best of all can easily be taken down and reconfigured/ resized. Read on for instructions on how to make our easy DIY Planter Box as well as a pictures of what our garden looks like 2 months after planting it.
[hr gap=”30″]Easy DIY Planter Box Instructions[hr gap=”30″]
-8 2X6 wooden boards cut into the dimensions you would like for your garden (we upcycled fence panels for our project that where thinner so we put two in each slot instead of 1)
Step 1: Measure the space where you would like your garden to be. Subtract 8 inches from each length (to account for the blocks) and have your boards cut to that size. For example if you want your planter box to be 6 feet by 6 feet, have 8 boards cut to be 5 feet, 4 inches each.
Step 2: Lay out your planter blocks in the corners of where you would like your planter box to be, placing two blocks placed (one on top of the other) in each corner.
Step 3: Slide boards into the slats of the block to create the walls of your planter box, creating 4 walls stacked 2 high. (We used 1X6 boards so we slid two boards in each slat instead of one.)
Step 4: We lined the sides of our planter box by using a staple gun to attach plastic sheeting to avoid having the wood rotting. We also lined the bottom of the planter box by stapling landscaping fabric/ weed fabric to avoid damage to our patio and roots growing down through the bricks. Lastly we placed cardboard along the bottom of our planter box to help with water absorption.
Step 5: Fill with soil and start planting!
View my Gardening Highlights on Instagram Stories where I share what the planter box looked like when it was just planted:
And look at it now!
My husband also added some boards on top to give it a more finished look.
The cucamelons are starting to grow.
The blueberry tomatoes are turning the prettiest shade of purple.
And the ground cherries are thriving!
My kids are enjoying taking care of our plants and can’t wait to see all of the fruits and vegetables that come from our garden from the Garden Therapy Kids’ Gardening Kit!
Ready to win a copy of Garden Therapy’s ebook Get Growing! Expert Seed-Starting for the DIY Gardener? Enter below!