Half Wine Barrels on Wheels

Our landlord makes wine.

Underneath the garage there is a basement full of old barrels and wine-making equipment that hasn’t been used in a while.  Last he landlord asked if I’d like to have one of the barrels for planting.  Um…YES, please!  He also offered to cut it in half for me.  Perfect!

He finally dropped off two half-barrels a few weeks ago – great timing!

Thanks to the folks at Talking-Dog I found a great way to attach casters to the bottom of the barrels so that I can play around with where to put them and move them more easily if necessary.

One of the barrel bottoms was a bit warped, so the pieces of wood didn’t fit very well and it was king of hit or miss with the 3″ screws I was using, but eventually I managed to secure the wood pieces.

Not bad, huh?  I am hoping that we can score some more.  They would save me a ton of money on large planters, plus I really love the way they look – and since they were used for wine, they are food safe!

I’ve had some concerns about planting veggies in the ground for several reasons.  First of all there are so many trees and roots it is hard to dig a decent sized space.  Once all the trees fill in and the figs branch out, there isn’t quite enough sun for a vegetable patch.  Most importantly, I’ve never had the soil tested and have found an alarming number of batteries in the ground wherever I have dug in.

(The battery mystery has at last been solved, by they way! Charlie finally figured it out – the previous tenants must have had lots of battery-operated footlights…and apparently they never actually properly disposed of any of the batteries, preferring to, you know, just LEAVE them in the GROUND. ???)

So, I would much prefer planting veggies and herbs in containers where I can control what the growing medium is.

I still need to drill some drainage holes in the bottoms before I can fill them.  I’ m hoping I can pick up a drill bit piece that will make a holes larger than 1/4 inch – ha.

I may line the barrels with a bit of landscape cloth too, still not sure.  I am pretty sure I will fill the bottom 1/3 with styrofoam peanuts or something similar to help lighten the load and cut back on the amount of soil I need use and buy.

The hardest part is narrowing down what to put in there!

I think an herb barrel would be really nice…close to the kitchen, and plenty of room for everyone’s roots.

Sage, thyme, rosemary, chives, oregano, hopefully some basil…I think I should be able to fit them all in there…the barrels are actually pretty big.

I’d love to fill one with potatoes, or lettuces and peppers…and I would love to have some filled with flowers…maybe a small shrub for the front of the house.  (I splurged on a self-watering grow box for tomatoes…that will be another post soon!)

What I would really love is to grow a peony or a rose (shrub or tea or climbing)…if I could find one that can handle living in a large container, I’d be able to make sure it got a spot in the sun.

CLEARLY, I’m going to need more barrels.  Good thing my husband shoveled all that snow all winter long for the landlord!  🙂

Busting A Concrete Move (and the search for step-able groundcovers).

Last weekend my husband went to the hardware store and came home with a sledgehammer!  I knew what this meant:  the concrete curb in the middle of our yard was coming down.  Yippee!

Evidently it used to be a “cabana” tent area, and the curb had holes for tent poles.

As cool as a cabana tent sounds, we never saw ourselves having one (or putting it there if we did.)

We did, however, see ourselves tripping over the curb in a frenzy to grab the perfect fig from the fig trees some afternoon or after a margarita or two some evening.  In addition to being potentially dangerous, we also though it just looked odd and closed off the space:

(these photos were taken last July when we first came to look at the apartment – hence the long grass and unraked leaves…nice to see some GREEN, though!)

Here’s another shot of it:

Fortunately for us our landlord agreed and gave us the go-ahead to “get rid of it.”

It was pretty incredible to watch (no, I didn’t take a turn at the bat) and the whole thing was finished much faster than I would have imagined it possible.  Each piece of the curb cracked pretty easily into halves, which Charlie was able to break up or dig out of the ground.  The hardest part seemed to be moving the concrete chunks away afterwards.  Half of them are now lining the end of our driveway and the other half are temporarily at the back of the yard.  Even so, the space looks so much more open without that curb! (Although bare naked without any tree foliage and with those fig trees pruned back so much.)

Miraculously, that very day I saw an ad on FreeCycle – someone had done a huge garden renovation and was giving away fill dirt!  Once Charlie took the out the curb, we were left with an empty “moat” around the circle, so free fill dirt was music to my ears.  It’s times like these, though, that I do wish we had a car.  It just comes with the territory of living in NYC that sometimes you’re going to call a car service and ask for a mini van, and when they show up you’re going to have an old sheet and 6 contractor bags of soil.

If we knew someone with a truck or some movers with great rates, I would have stocked up on more in a heartbeat.  We simply didn’t have a way to inexpensively transport it.  That, plus each bag was at least 50 pounds…not an easy task to load and unload.

We got enough to fill in the area and still have a little to spare for my half-wine barrels, though!

Now we are looking for something to plant in that dirt, and in the other scrappy looking areas of  the “lawn.”  Last year grass didn’t grow so well in the front half of the yard because the fig trees cast so much shade.  We’re not really sure what to expect this year.  We’re looking into some low-growing ground covers, at least for around the circle.

Right now we’re considering some combination of:

Blue Star Creeper

Blue Star Creeper close up:

Creeping Jenny:

Creeping Thyme:

More Creeping Thyme:  

Silene acaulis Moss Campion:  

Veronica oltensis Miniature Speedwell:  

Veronica repens:  

or maybe even some MOSS.  This is sort of what we may be going for:

http://www.steppables.com claims to have several plants (including those I’ve listed above) that can handle a small degree of foot traffic, and http://www.mossacres.com sells “moss millkshakes.”  Hmmm.

 

I guess mulch is always an option too!

Anyone have any experience with any of those plants?