Milk Crate Jungle

So. The backyard. It all started like this…

Once upon a time a boy wanted to start a heirloom tomato patch in Florida. Unfortunately, the Florida soil cannot sustain a tomato plant. The PH is all wrong, or something. So, the always intrepid boy acquires some milk crates, lines them with garbage bags, and fills those bags with nice store-bought potting soil along with tomato fertilizer. However, thanks to Google searches, we found out that to avoid having tomato-eating bugs destroy our future crop, the milk crates should be elevated off the acidy-useless-non-fertile-bug-filled Florida soil.

Hmm. What could we use? Something free. Something we have a lot of… hmm.

Ah. Beer bottles from the recycling bin. The narrow end gets hammered into the ground with a rubber mallet, and the flat top supports one corner of a milk crate.

We have 24 tomato plants. That is 24 milk crates. Multiplied by 4 beer bottles to hold up each crate equals: 94. That’s 4 cases of beer. So when Schuyler gets testy with me and says, “You need to chip in more around here,” I just point to the beer bottles. Because 94 divided by 2 is 47, and that's 47 instances of me 'chipping in.'

And they all lived happily ever after.