How about a little update featuring my project from this past weekend?
A couple months ago, I bought one of those TopsyTurvy upside-down tomato planters. Basically it's a plastic bag of dirt with a hole in the bottom and I must say, it works great. The little tomato plant we started in there has grown continuously and shows no signs of slowing down.
But true to my nature, I didn't see any reason to spend $10 for this product when I could instead use some of the crap I have laying around and spend my Saturday with yet another DIY project.
I started with a couple kitty litter buckets and a few half empty cans of spray paint left over from my Mac Planter builds. The plastic handles on the buckets are useless, so I cut them off before painting.
Then I used a hole saw and cut a 1" hole right square in the bottom. Not pictured, I also drilled a half dozen very small holes in the bottom towards each side. I figure it's got to have at least a little drainage.
I drilled smaller holes on each corner and using a combination of tie wraps, old doggy chain, and bits of soaker hose, I constructed handles it could hang by.
Here's our victim, a healthy but small Poblano Pepper seedling.
Even though it's small, the hole I'm putting it through is smaller. What I did was cut up a plastic grocery bag and rolled this plant's leaves up with it into a cylinder which I then fed through the hole. I cut a kitchen sponge in half and placed the root ball on that. The intent is the sponge will stop dirt from going out through the hole while allowing the stem to get bigger.
Not pictured, but easy enough to visualize, I now fill the rest of the bucket with dirt. Since I have an area of flat dirt at the top, I put in 3 little rows of radish seeds in the top. I figure they won't grow downwards very far so shouldn't compete with the upwards growing tomato roots.
Here is the finished product hanging on the fence along with the 2nd bucket and the original TopsyTurvy tomato plant. At the height I've got them now, I can just barely see into the top of the buckets if I stand on my toes (that's a very tall fence).
That's it for now. I'll follow up with pictures of the results in a few weeks.