New year, new office, new garden!

For a start, Green Ideas has moved into a bigger office, so everything’s feeling new and exciting. We’d outgrown the old space, and shifted over the break into an old factory that’s been refreshed with a new green fit-out and a lick of eco-conscious paint. It’s not quite the Google HQ, but it’s not far off!

Most exciting for me is the fact we now have three big planter boxes in our sunny courtyard – which means, woohoo! It’s gardening time.

Those in our team who don’t already grow their own salad and veges tend to buy lots of green stuff for their midday meals (though I’m a bit more of a pie guy, to be honest) – so I figure if we can get an edible garden going, we’ll be able to cut out more of the pointless packaging that comes with buying lunches.

And it also means we can turn any food waste from the kitchen into soil, instead of sending it to landfill to rot.

So my basic plan is:

• Get some soil – we need to fill three big planter boxes
• Plant some high-yielding crops (beans, tomatoes, salad greens and herbs)
• Get a worm farm started to turn the kitchen waste into fertiliser and soil
• Get a bokashi bucket, to compost any meat scraps etc without bad smells

However I’m totally new to gardening in planter boxes, so I’d appreciate some advice. Any and all answers to the below would be helpful!

Is it better to drill drainage holes in the bottom of the boxes, or is putting rocks / gravel in the bottom enough? The boxes are lined with plastic, so it could get quite soggy in there

Plus, do you have any soil, seedlings or so-forth that you’d like to donate?! We’ll happily credit your awesome business in our next e-newsletter if you want to help the Green Ideas garden get started!

So let us know your planter box gardening tips – and I’ll keep you up-to-date with progress.

Greg Roughan
 Editor, Green Ideas magazine

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