How to Plant a Shoe Rack Garden with Herbs and Vegetables

Hi, I’m Laura.  I work in Marketing for Scotts Miracle-Gro and we’re finally frost-free here in Ohio so I’m really ready to get started on some gardening projects.  You can see I live in an apartment, so I was scoping out some ideas on Pinterest for stuff to do in smaller-spaced gardens, and I saw some really cool ideas for hanging shoe rack gardens.  I saw a lot of vertical ones, but here I have a shoe rack I haven’t used in years and I’m thinking I’ll lay it flat on the ground and use some smaller vegetables.

This is going to be just like any other container gardening project except you have to pick the right plants for something this size.  So I measured it out.  It’s about 1 foot deep and then the squares at the top are about 5 inches wide on each side, so I’m going to try to stick to some smaller vegetables and also some herbs and some leaf lettuce and spinach, and I’ll have kind of a little salad garden.

So the important thing is using the right soil, so I’m going to use potting mix because this is a container garden.  I’m just going to start filling up each of these holes.  So this potting mix is pretty wet but that’s okay.  That just means the bag was sitting outside and we’ve had a few rainy days, and it means I’m not going to have to water my plants down quite as much whenever I plant them.  And we are using potting mix because even if it’s a shoe rack, it’s still a container so we need something a little bit looser that’s going to drain pretty well.  I don’t think I’m going to even need to add drain holes to this, though, because the cloth is pretty thin and I think the water will be able to go through it.

So I’ve drawn out a plan here of what I want to fill these ten boxes with.  On this side I’m going to start with some cucumbers, and those I’ll eventually need a stake for because they’ll grow up pretty tall.  Then I’m going to do some carrots, green onion, basil, two things of spinach, and two things of lettuce, and I filled the dirt up a little more on those since they’re shorter plants.

So it doesn’t look like much now.  I have a lot of seeds in there and just a few little seedlings, but I’m ready to put this in a really sunny spot so that these can grow up and I can start eating a fresh salad with my shoe rack veggie garden.