Its been just about 2 months since I planted my rain water fed home-made scrap-wood self-watering planter-box garden
(http://apps.biodieselhauling.org/Blog/?e=28851&d=05/12/2009&s=The%20Garden)



The neighborhood cats think the garden is an excellent toilet, but by a fortunate coincidence I happened to get a motion activated sprinkler head in one of my hauling jobs recently, and that has completely solved that problem.

The first thing I planted was a potato. It was originally meant for eating, but it went bad, so I threw it in the compost. Later I noticed stems pushing their way around the plastic cover, and lo and behold the 'bad' potato was sprouting. So maybe now I will get a good potato out of it.
My neighbor who gardens had told me even before I built the planter that she had a tomato plant for me. She also gave me a tomato stake; which, incidentally, I had given her about a year ago, having gotten it in a dump run and having no use for it at the time. Apparently she took a couple more than she really needed back then.
She also shared some lettuce seeds and a bean plant.

Later I discovered something else sprouting in my compost pile. I have no idea what it is, but I figure if it was there it was probably something I was eating, so I planted it. Up until this point I had spent nothing on my garden (except for the materials for the rain collection), but it was getting late in the season and I finally purchased a few plants from the farmer's market (I got a discount because I work at the market myself).
I got strawberries, and an onion. I also planted a few tiny carrots a neighbor gave me. She intended them to be eaten, but they still had the tops on, so I wanted to know if they might get any bigger. After a few days the tops had wilted and I forgot about them under the mulch. A couple weeks after that they had popped back up bigger than ever!
Most recently I planted the seeds of some grapes I bought at the market, but have yet to see if they will sprout.

The lettuce is growing in faster than I can harvest it;
the beans are ready to be picked;
and the strawberry (the most recent thing I planted) is already blossoming.
The tomato plant is gigantic, and I found the first 3 little green tomatoes.

Everything is growing much faster than expected, but they all seem to be sharing the space with each other very politely.



Yesterday I did some harvesting and actually cooked a meal with food I grew myself.
Of course this is a normal part of life for a lot of people, but for someone who has lived in big cities his whole life, it feels pretty amazing.



Around the same time I began the garden I was also working on increasing the efficiency of my truck, and my friend and fellow bikestation mechanic convinced me to enter my truck mods into instructable.com's efficiency contest.
I ended up winning runner-up in that contest.

The same website now has a garden contest!  So of course I entered it as well with my  planter (which cost me a total of zero dollars, being built entirely of random materials I kept from hauling/dump runs) and my rain-water-collection system.

Voting begins Today.
http://www.instructables.com/id/Large-Self-Watering-Planter-made-from-recycled-mat/