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A green gardening tip to grow vegetables earlier using Bottle Beds

by

John Yeoman

You may have heard of the proprietary Wall oWater , a plastic insulating blanket filled with water. Set it around your organic vegetables and it can bring them on weeks earlier than usual. It works! But heres a green gardening tip to grow organic vegetables more quickly – and its free.

Simply truss wine bottles together to make the frame of a round or rectangular tub. Fill the bottles with water – no need to cork them. Add compost to the frame and set out your plants.

The water in the bottles will absorb heat by day and radiate it into the soil by night, even if the sky is cloudy, so warming the roots. You will get much earlier plants, just as if you grew them in a traditional hot bed heated by rotting manure.

To turn the BottleBed into an even more efficient hot bed (without manure), simply push canes inside the frame and drape them with clear plastic to make a cloche. (One source of translucent plastic might be the sleeves with which dry cleaning shops protect clothes.)

Using a BottleBed cloche I was able to ripen tomatoes as early as late May, outdoors, in a temperate climate (zone 6) where outdoor tomatoes dont usually ripen before late August.

A hidden virtue

A hidden virtue of the BottleBed is that it impels you to haunt pubs and restaurants to beg their empty wine bottles or, reluctantly, to buy a furtive case of wine for the good of your garden.

Of course, you can keep a BottleBed in place year after year. But beware: winter frosts may crack thin glass bottles that are filled with water. (Champagne bottles seem curiously immune to frost.) Broken glass makes your lettuces all too crunchy.

Solution: use large plastic milk or cola bottles, instead. A friend in Nepal e-mailed me that she was using BottleBeds to grow earlier crops in the Himalayas. I advised her: Use plastic cola bottles, not glass! She said: Sadly, we now have plenty of plastic empties at the summit of Everest.

Filled with water, plastic bottles survive the hardest frost and last for years. They’re easier to lace together and they stand more sturdily than wine bottles. As it’s the mass of water that conserves heat, not the containers, those big two-litre water-filled jugs are even more efficient insulators than glass bottles. Nor does it matter if the bottles are clear or dark.

It doubles as a conventional cold frame

In winter, you can dig the soil out of the frame and the frame stays rigid enough for use as a conventional cold frame, topped with corrugated plastic or an old window. Next summer, fill it with compost and grow early plants in it. And so on, year after year.

Coloured wine bottles can be very decorative. But to disguise the ugliness of plastic bottles, surround them with hessian sacking or carpet offcuts or, best of all, cover them with hydrotufa.

This is a composite of cement, sand, peat moss and perlite or vermiculite which bond together to make a material like imitation stone. Other porous durable ingredients can be used too, provided one third of the mix is Portland cement. To make hydrotufa, mix together equal parts of dry pre-mixed Portland cement and sand, peat moss and perlite or vermiculite. Add just enough water so the mass is malleable without being runny.

Wait ten minutes so the chemicals in the cement can work. Then pat the hydrotufa around the bottles so they form a stone-like wall. With practice, you can mould the damp hydrotufa into very ornamental shapes or patterned surfaces. You can also colour it with dyes or, of course, paint it.

Beware: hydrotufa is porous. Plants will root into it. And its not very strong, so dont try lifting a hydrotufa tub filled with heavy soil.

A BottleBed made from plastic milk or cola bottles, and disguised with hydrotufa, can be a thing of beauty. It will reliably bring on plants much earlier in the season than usual. Best of all, it’s free

Dr John Yeoman PhD is founder of the centre for natural gardening ideas, the Gardening Guild. For a free big 6000-word ebook Lazy Secrets for Natural Gardening Success, go to: http://www.gardeningguild.org/lazy

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A green gardening tip to grow vegetables earlier using Bottle Beds}