Grow a garden on the face of your fence and/or home ================================== 7 Steps to Building a Gutter Garden 1. Find old lengths of roof gutter (anything lying around in the garage or even the recycled kind if there is somewhere in your hometown with recycled building materials). Make sure to find aluminum gutters so you don’t have to deal with rust. 2. Attach to the sunny side of your garage, an old chain link fence, or a wooden one. Use your imagination on how you can attach the gutter to the side of your garage or a fence. 3. At each end of the gutter, place a piece of screen/Mesh, also salvage materials, to hold in the compost or planting soil (this will hold in the soil while also allowing the excess water to drain to the gutter below). I would not advice completely sealing off the end and poking holes in the bottom, but that is one way to do it. 4. Place the gutters in a way that the gutter below can capture any run-off from the gutter above, as that is nutrient rich soil that you will be creating (remember those toys we had as kids, where the ball rolled down one slope then dropped to the one below to roll in the opposite direction? Same thing here). 5. Underneath the very bottom gutter, place a bucket at the end that can capture what will be a rich, smoothie-like compost that can be recycled back into the top gutter. 6. Add seeds for lettuce, spinach, radishes, herbs (nothing too heavy like winter squash or potatoes and nothing that requires too much depth to grow). 7. And enlist your kids, spouse, partner, friends, neighbors in the watering routine. Or, invest in a water pump with a timer. All you need is a secondary large bucket of water to submerse the pump into. Be careful when buying a water pump. You need to take into account how high your top gutter is off the ground. I would invest in a heavy duty water pump. The package should list GPH. For instance: EcoPlus Submersible Pump
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 08:26:17 +0000