A Claw Foot Garden

A couple of years in the thought bank and a few months in the making, we finally have our claw foot tub garden doing it’s thing. With the smaller backyard, the potential for rabbits (many, many of them in our old neighborhood, but not too many here yet), and an aging set of backs (I know we are only mid-30s, but that’s super old, right?), we set out in the design process of the backyard to incorporate an elevated garden set up of some sort. We made the space for it, but idea after idea slipped through the cracks of reality, until we kept coming back to one of the first ones we thought of: get a bath tub.

It turns out that finding a claw foot tub isn’t difficult at all – see Craigslist, rather getting it, moving it, and placing it are the challenging components of the operation. Thankfully there is a Dad with a pick-up truck and a few hours of help close by. The tub was found as a leftover piece of a rental remodel in Littleton, and is straight from 1914 – as stamped on the bottom. We brought it home, set it in place, and filled it with rock, then sand, then the most expensive bags of organic potting soil you can find on this side of the rocky mountains. Oh, top that off with a trip to the garden center to get some summer squash, spaghetti squash, red bell pepper, Japanese cucumber, jalapeno, basil, and zucchini. It’s admitingly a shotgun approach to such a small space to plant, but this is a trial year to see what grows in our backyard tub. Next year might be a little more focused based on the successes of this growing season. Now, we dump water and time into the garden, and somewhere between 60-100 days, we get some goods.

Outside of our hopeful dinner plate returns on the project, we are using it as an opportunity to begin to teach Ezra about gardening, growing, sustainability, and local resource (yea, Japanese versions of vegetables make a hard connection to the local component). His buy in has been simple as he is very interested in what is going to happen…just an opportunity to help plant, to help water, and a set of Go, Diego, Go gardening gloves. His concern and interest are currently measured daily, with the once-a-day inquiry about watering. I think that this is also going to be a good lesson in time and patience, as he is already making connections that 100 days isn’t immediate.

Updates including inception, growth, and use will be posted here…stay tuned.