Planting Tomatoes In A Tub

Tomato and I go way back, it was the only vegetable kind enough to let go of it's ego so that I could feel more confident in myself when it came to gardening.  Tomato was the only vegetable that survived out of many in my old apartment, it became quite bushy and strong and yielded many a great sweet red tomatoes.  So here I am again planting tomatoes but this time in my new garden and in an old bathtub no less!  This should be interesting.

It took a littles less than half my Sunday and this includes the time it took to pick up tomato seeds from Whole Foods and the organic ground soil from Home Depot.

When I finally had the tub in place I filled the bottom up with loose rocks that were small and medium in size for proper drainage, there is one large drain hole on one side of the tub but I figured better safe than sorry, I also took the time to prop up the tub just a bit on one side so that any excess water could run out through the drain hole on the other side of the tub, the dirt ground wasn't nearly as level as I would have liked it to be.

I filled the tub up with a mixture of sandy dirt and the organic ground soil, a mixture of roughly 1/2 and 1/2.  Once the tub was filled, I watered the soil down, planted my seeds (one on each side of the stick), 3 seeds per hole (a total of 6 seeds in 2 holes), misted the top layer and began thinking of security measures against birds, slugs and other creeping pests.

While at the gardening store I ran across a large roll called Bird Block which basically is a flexible plastic kind of netting, easy to cut with scissors and easy to fold.  I used this bird block netting to cover the top of the tub weighing it down on all four corners with bricks, so far it's worked really well and I do just love it, before the Bird Block I was using something very similar that was made of wire which made it infinitely much harder to handle.

One of the main reasons I planted the tomatoes in the tub is that it just makes it that much easier from keeping the growing plants away from ground pests, indeed I'm not expected to shield it from every kind of bug, that would just be impossible, but the more bugs and slugs I can keep away from it the better.

As you already know the tub has a drain hole on one side which meant that slugs (fastly becoming my nemesis) can still get into the tub soil, so as a precautionary measure (call me totally paranoid), I placed a brick next to the exposed hole which is located at the bottom of the tub near the ground, the water will still be able to drain but hopefully the slugs wont be able to find their way in.