Garden beds made from recycled printer cartridges

Last year I grew solely in pots. Two problems with that, moving the pots to mow the lawn, and the moisture retention of the soil in the pot just didn't really last. If any sort of hot weather came about, plants needed to be watered once a day.

Now I took a new job in July last year (by the way, it's a fan-bloody-tastic job, Hi Chris!) that involves a significant amount of travel. I didn't want my dear wife to have the burden of watering all the plants for a few hours and also have to look after the devil kids that also co-exist in our house, so I took about looking at different ways to build garden beds.

I don't know what I was searching for on Google that lead me to find this link, but I was immediately inspired to do the same. Thankfully the company that produces the eWood, which is made from recycled printer cartridges, is only a couple of suburbs away. With the help of my both my dad and father-in-law (god bless them), we built 6 in total.

The above photo was taken on October 26th, after I had started planting some of the numerous chilli seedlings that had been growing indoors since July.

There's absolutely stuff all soil in those garden beds. I had read up on something called the "no-dig garden" technique, which is where you rely on the breaking down of organic material to produce a lovely humus for the plants to thrive on. All 3 beds had both layers of lucerne hay and chicken manure, but there are some subtle differences in all of them with some additional contents. All garden beds only had 3 bags of garden soil from different nurseries in the local area, and topped off with sugar cane mulch.

If we now look at some photos over the last few months:

12th December

15th January

17th February

As you can see, these garden beds are going absolutely gung-ho. I fertilise them once a week, with either a guano (bird or bat droppings) based fertiliser, or compost tea brewed from worm castings. Pretty much every single one of the chilli plants has fruit on it, as you can see below:

So I can't recommend enough the use of the no-dig garden technique. You hardly have to water the plants because the moisture retention is great, but there's plenty of air gaps that the roots of the plants so dearly crave.