Queen of the Jumble

My garden!  A few months ago my hubby helped me put this together.  I did a ton of research to try to figure out the best way to do this so once I came up with a solid plan, we went out and got the supplies.  2 kiddie pools, gravel, soil, and strips of fabric.  We layered the gravel inside of the first pool and drilled drainage holes around the sides.  Then we drilled holes throughout the bottom of the second pool, threading strips of fabric through each hole and knotting them securely.  We dumped all of the soil into the top kiddie pool and planted all of my little sproutlings that I had already been growing for a few weeks using my little self watering seedling starter, (here is exactly what I used, got it at target: http://www.burpee.com/seed-starting/grow-kits/xl-ultimate-growing-system-prod002628.html?catId=2211.)  The idea of the kiddie pool garden is to fill the bottom pool with water and as the strips of fabric wick up water into the soil in the top pool, water gets distributed evenly amongst the plants.  This way you don’t have to water them everyday.  At first though, my plants started dying so my hubby dug down to the bottom to try to figure out why.  He realized that it was just getting soupy and yucky at the bottom of the soil so we removed all of the fabric strips.  This seemed to help a lot but then a couple of weeks later they started looking unhealthy again so we tried placing an umbrella over the garden to protect it from the sun.  Once again, we managed to save the plants, it seemed they were getting scorched in the heat.  A couple of weeks after that they started turning yellow which I suspected may be from over watering so we laid off of that for a while and now they are thriving more than ever.  Strange adventure it is to raise plants!! Much more trial and error than I originally thought but it’s been fun and I still can’t wait to finally harvest all of my fresh and organic zucchinis, tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers!  For now at least I have my yummy basil.  Looks like I’ll have to start prepping already for which winter plants to try out! :-D