DIY Video: Build a Grow Box to Plant Your Own Vegetables

Jo Carr of Imperial Beach has been passionate about getting fresh vegetables to people for a long time. She grew up on a farm in Connecticut, has worked as a master gardener, volunteers at the every Friday and continues to look for ways to create a community garden.

Especially important to her is providing veggies for the young, old and low-income workers.

Starting your own garden can take time and isn’t always easy, especially for seniors or the city’s many renters who don’t have their own yard, so below are her instructions on how to quickly make your own box to grow vegetables, or watch the video.

The box can be put in your backyard, porch, apartment patio or wherever else you can find a bit of sunshine.

You will need:

• A plastic storage tub
• Plant food or fertilizer
• Roughly three feet of PVC pipe
• Three feet of French drain pipes
• Seeds
• Soil
• Water

1. Cut a hole around the edges of the lid of the tub.

2. Poke holes in the tub’s lid.

3. Put six-inch-high French drains in the remaining tub lid, which acts as a shelf for the soil.

4. Place a six-inch PVC pipe in the center of the lid acting as the shelf.

4. Place a screen over the top of the French drains.

5. Cut your PVC pipe in half about two inches high to allow water to flow into the bottom of the bin.

6. Cut a small hole in the side of the tub three to four inches high for overflow

7. Add soil, water and plant food into the pipe. Plant food can be fertilizer, compost or even seaweed.

“I make my own fertilizers, but then I also do use Miracle-Gro, but I water that down because it’s highly concentrated,” Carr said. “You can grow anything, especially here you can grow year round.”

Buying something with a similar purpose can cost you $100 or $150, she said.

Growing in a box isn’t the same as a true garden, but there can be advantages.

“I’ve had really good success, especially with the black tub, growing jalapeños. They love the heat,” Carr told a passerby who complained that growing vegetables in his back yard was difficult, he thinks because of the salt in the soil.

In another example, Carr mentioned a friend’s experiences who recently moved and no longer had her garden.

“She laid a few bags of soil out on her driveway. They’re already perforated so she didn’t need to do that, so she put a few seedlings in and she had more vegetables than growing in the ground at her previous garden,” she said.

Once enough people express interest in making their own box, classes will be held to teach people how to make their own.

To contact Carr, email jcinibca@cox.net.