Complete Instructions and Tips to Create Amazing Self-Watering Garden Container.

Excerpt

Chapter One: The EZ Green Planter isn’t New – It’s Just Better!

We hope this simple little book will make the act of gardening effortless for you. The EZ Green Planter is the culmination of many evolutions of the self-watering growing container. Preceding the EZ Green Planter was the commercial plastic Earth Box® and its many spinoffs, the do-it-yourself self watering containers made from storage bins, and the popular “bucket” gardens. The EZ Green Planter takes these great ideas one giant, healthy step further. With this new design of the EZ Green Planter, you will gain the fabulous benefits of safe and environmentally sound materials you can use to create your own long lasting, economical and easy-to-tend growing system.

This idea came after visiting our friends Susan and Bill who had a beautiful, lush container garden growing in the commercially produced Earth Box®. They told us the boxes naturally watered themselves by absorbing water contained in the bottom, but gave us no more information than that. Ever the creator, Zingaro’s mind quickly latched onto this idea. For days, he just couldn’t stop thinking about this simple but amazingly effective idea. How brilliant that was – self watering through evaporation and absorption!

He holed up in his workshop and immediately began formulating designs of his own from a stack of old buckets. He spent three days cutting, drilling and attaching components and finally he did it…he created several rather unsightly but highly functional variations of a self-watering plant container…all from the idea in his head…all with his own hands…all from recycled materials.

Then, to appease his aesthetic eye, Zingaro decided to look further into commercially available grow boxes like our friends had…the whole time reeling from the success of his new creation and gloating on his remarkable newfound genius. Armed at his computer with Google, he started to search for self-watering containers. Before he could double click twice, he was looking at his own incarnation of the self-watering grow bucket. There it was in full screen glory – the container he had just spent three days to create! Continuing his search, he found pages and pages of variations on the concept. He had just spent three days of his life consumed by an idea that had already been created a thousand times over!

But Zingaro just couldn’t let go of that idea. As great as it was, it still had room for improvement. He began to research other ways that people had approached the idea of growing in self-contained, self-watering modules. There were some remarkably great improvements to be found and several variations that were just plain silly. He learned that the U.S. Patent office had first issued patents on self watering containers in the early 1900’s. The self-watering concept was far from new and, with an apology to our heirs, far from ours to lay claim to.

Yet, Zingaro was still driven to improve on the one major flaw of this great idea. What was that? All the growing containers he found, whether homemade or store bought, were made of plastic. Plastic eventually deteriorates. Plastic might be fine for short term use, but we don’t want our food drawing its nutrients and water surrounded by the potential toxins of plastic. And plastic degrades, especially in the sun, which is exactly where our plants like it best.

The new and amazing EZ Green Planter has several distinct benefits over any of its predecessors:

#1: It eliminates potentially toxic contact with plastic while your food is growing.

#2: It is virtually indestructible and weather resistant, providing decades if not eons of service.

#3: It can be completely made by you!

With the help of this book, you can create your own lush garden anywhere! Have you ever tried to garden only to be discouraged by the meager fruits of your labor? Well, put those thoughts behind you. You are about to embark on a special journey as you read this book, and an even better one as your growing space fills with vibrant EZ Green Planter gardens and healthy food in abundance.

Let us warn you that we’re lazy people. We never want to work at gardening. We never have the patience to stand there and water plants day in and day out. Yet we always want to eat fresh vegetables and pick fresh herbs from our garden any time we please. Zingaro always wants to fill his plate with the colors and flavors of fully ripened, straight from the earth delights. But how can you do this without a lot of time and trouble? The EZ Green Planter is the answer and here are the reasons why:

Proper watering is the key to a vibrant and healthy garden. A regular watering schedule and continuous water availability to the plant are fundamental to growth. Few of us have much time to fuss with watering at a regular time every day. When a person works a lot, travels a lot or is occupied with creative ideas or family and friends, they often neglect watering their plants on a schedule. Watering or the lack thereof is the single greatest cause of gardening failure.

The EZ Green Planter takes advantage of continuously available water to the roots of the plant – where they need it most – and is constantly in tune with the plant’s thirst. The plants are able to enjoy the luxury of setting their own watering schedule to suit their needs. They simply uptake water slowly and steadily as they naturally need it. Growing in the EZ Green Planter environment lets the plant follow its own rhythm without the distress of over or under watering.

This book will show you how to create this growing system that continuously and perfectly waters itself. Your only task is to top off the system once or twice a week. This is a simple task you can do when you are just relaxing. This system can connect to a typical water faucet, existing drip irrigation system or garden hose to keep the plants watered automatically so you can leave your garden unattended for long periods of time. Your EZ Green Planters can even connect together to create a field of multiple EZ Greens that water from a single source.

Location and soil containment is another big challenge that limits a potential garden – especially in the urban environment. Another problem solved! Now you can plant a garden just about anywhere. You can grow a lush garden in a parking lot or on the roof of an apartment building. And because you can elevate the entire container of the EZ Green Planter, you won’t have to stoop or bend to harvest your prolific garden yield.

The EZ Green Planter features the ability to install a pole and grid system that lets you surround your plants with a protective barrier to keep critters out. You can install a screen above your plants to stop those hungry birds from devouring your garden in its early stages. The encroaching fall and winter chills can be staved off with protective sheeting that can extend your growing season for months. This same sheet method acts as a cold frame in early spring to give young seedlings a head start.

And the GREATEST BENEFIT OF ALL, you and your family can enjoy organic food free of pesticides and herbicides. In today’s world of commercial production and genetic engineering, that’s a big plus. You can simply and safely fertilize with organic fertilizers applied to the soil surface of the EZ Green Planter and get a boost by adding organic fish emulsions or seaweed concentrates directly to the water in the reservoir.

But you don’t have to stop there. By following the techniques in this book, you can rely mainly on the nutrients from your kitchen discards to enrich your garden – and avoid filling your trashcan with things that are not only useful but highly nutritious to your garden. The composting techniques detailed in this book are easy and amazingly prolific, and will grow right along with your garden.

The EZ Green Planter also encourages worm life. These gifts of the garden will root around in the soil, aerate the plant roots, multiply and provide organic nutrients for your lifetime. Worms are economical and easy to come by – at bait stores or in the dark, damp corners of your yard.

Beyond all that, the safety and longevity of the EZ Green Planter is unprecedented. Many recycled products are used to make self watering systems like the double bucket grow container mentioned earlier. One bucket above holds the soil and a bucket underneath contains the water. However, containers made of plastic can grow more toxic with every year they are exposed to the elements. Plastic does deteriorate, particularly in prolonged sunshine, and could be hazardous to your garden and your health.

You may have heard of the Grow Box® and the Earth Box® self watering systems. These commercially available products carry the risks of plastic. Almost all of the commercial self-watering devices rely on plastic construction. Is it safe for long term use? This question is still unanswered by the ‘experts’ and we choose not to guess. We have chosen to limit any direct long-term contact with plastic for the soil that transmits nutrients to our food and the water that feeds our plants.

In the beginning, you may not save lots of money by growing your own vegetables. But you will save time. That’s right – time, and lots of it. And how valuable is your time? After our initial set up of EZ Green Planters, we made far fewer trips to the grocery store. We just go to the garden and pick our supper right from the soil. We eat from our garden daily – 20 to 100% of our meals come from our EZ Green garden every day.

Before our EZ Green garden, we often ventured out to the store for fresh vegetables. Though we always had plenty of staples on hand like rice and beans in the pantry, meats and chicken in the freezer, our fresh vegetables had to be replenished frequently. Relying on our garden, we now make far fewer trips to the market and save money like this: When we went to the market for vegetables, we always ended up with more in our basket and spent more than expected. By the time we left the store the tab always rang up at $50 or more. Now, with fewer trips to the store, there are far fewer tabs to add up!

Vegetables may be relatively cheap at the market, but we usually have no idea where they came from or how they were grown. Vegetables contain the same chemical pesticides and fertilizers that were used to grow them. The EZ Green Planter will grow food without pesticides or chemicals. And you can grow your best food using your own compost. This compost, which will be described in detail later, is made up of your daily kitchen scraps which are rendered more organic by the composting process!

The EZ Green Planter instructions show you how to build your own raised planter that is self watering, easy to access, and will produce healthy, vibrant vegetables for years. In many climates you can grow your garden year round. And, best of all, you will be able to build as many EZ Green Planters as you like with a few simple tools and the detailed list of materials that are available from any building supply center.

You are about to save money and live healthier long term by investing a small amount of time and energy now. When you make one of our EZ Green Planters, you will be rewarded time and time again. Once completed, your EZ Green Planter will produce food year after year. The construction and materials will outlast any plastic container and may even outlast you. And with the health benefits of an EZ Green garden, that could be a long, long time.

Read more about EZ Green Planter – The Ultimate Self-Watering Grow Container, Zingaro and Wanda Joy HERE.

Copyright 2010 Zingaro and Wanda Joy. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.