An amazing and genuine idea of a man called James Brian ended in a fantastic achievement. His innovative plan showed to be extremely effective and functional, although done in a simple way. Gardeners and repurposing fanatics behold, keyhole garden, meets tomato cage, meets drip irrigation.
Bryan tells he has started planting four tomatoes around a garbage can with holes drilled in the bottom rim on May 28th. He then planted a second row up about 10 inches.
Next, he was burying the can to a height where the top holes only barely showed over the ground. He placed two shovels of compost and added water in the can every 2 days.
He avoided watering the leaves. After less than a month and a half, the 4 plants got to a height of 5ft 4 inches. Furthermore, they were loaded with green tomatoes and hundreds of tomato blossoms.
“July 9th, after a week of record, high temperatures and very little rain…the plants here are loaded with tomatoes inside the cage and full of blooms too!” – joyfully says James Bryan via Hometalk. “I grow tomatoes now for the market, and I have a higher yield per plant than most other growers,” he replies.
Because they are very cheaper and easier to get in quantities, Brian now switched to using 5-gallon buckets instead of the old a 13-gallon kitchen garbage can he used for growing the tomatoes. You can use even a larger as long as it provides every plant with 5 gallons of water per week.
For example, in case you use a 5-gallon bucket and plant 2 tomato plants around it, you fill the bucket twice per week. Or if you use a 13 gallon, you could plant up to 5 plants around it.
