Ok, Smart Pots awesome. See my photo taken 10th October 2015, where it's STILL producing like mad [picked a bunch of yellow summer squash, cukes and still tomatoes this morning], in Colorado no less. I just bought several Junior bag beds to add to my garden to grow more next year, (ditching all other pots) and some taller pot style Smart Pots to try potatoes & some new things. For Soil, additives, fertilizer and irrigation I used, see below.. it was foolproof, anyone could do this. I used a mix of (all organic) garden soil for raised beds (NOT potting soil), my own & some commercial compost dirt (I compost over winter, Colorado Boulder area gets 300 days of sun, so it works), some vermiculite to aerate and retain moisture, little bit of lime on the tomatoes side, some coir throughout and shoved uncomposted bananas, eggshells, coffee grounds & some other soft, non seeded veggie waste, straight into the soil all season. I planted the seedlings I raised back in Feb (inside by a south facing window, in a cheap little greenhouse that can be disassembled). I placed a mint plant (chocolate mint because I like the flowers) in the middle (MUST be in a container, in the earth, not direct planted or it will take over your bed & garden !) to keep bugs at bay and it worked, I don't used any herbicides or pesticides & grow completely organic, I useDr. Earth 706P Organic 7 All Purpose Fertilizer in Poly Bag, 4-Pound fertilizer (various ones for general and tomatoes etc) The Coir I used, was this one and I just bought moreCompressed Coconut Coir Brick, 10 Pound (lb)-Green Texan Organic Farms I irrigated it with just micro line drippers running off a standard garden hose connected to a timer system, used one 2 gal-per-hour dripper at the bottom of each tomato plant (4 of them - 2 yellow salad pear and 2 giant heirloom and got SO MANY I ran out of room in our giant freezer after making 2 very big batches of sauce (over 60 pounds worth), eating pounds, giving bags of them away), PLUS planted eggplant (1 plant), cucumber (1 plant), summer squash (4 plants, different kinds) and a bell pepper. I increased auto watering time over the summer as they grew and rooted deeper. Very efficient & easy. It all fit in the largest Bag Bed, Not ONE thing died or failed to produce, they all grew and all produced incredibly well all summer (some still are & it's almost mid Oct), especially the tomatoes, squash and cukes. Best growing system I ever used. EVER. Better than my raised cedar bed or whiskey barrel or other pots or ground planting and I can reuse it for at least a few years. I'm also going to try my herbs in the upright hanging-garden style ones next season, attached to the fence, being all about efficient watering and irrigation on everything, because I have automatic timers set up on 3 garden hose lines with a 12 line micro tube manifold set up on each hose for my veggies, flowers & herbs to each bed and pot, so for a disabled person, this makes it possible for me to garden, for an able person, it makes it effortless, once set up. It was lot of effort to set all this up, mostly the irrigation, but the Smart Pots were the absolute easiest part and WOW are they sturdy and work exceedingly well at growing anything. I'm prepping my new ones now for next year so all I have to do is turn the soil a bit, fertilize and throw my seedlings in there. Just Awesome and pays for itself in organic produce in weeks once fruiting starts. I did also use an Earth Box to grow more tomatoes and although they produced well, it was a complete pain to water down a tube (my only manual watering, because a micro line wouldn't fill it during the timer watering I had everything on), to fill the base of the box so it would wick up water. The legs collapsed on the one I had, so I put it on the ground, but the rubber thing holding the (barely big enough) black plastic you have to use, over the plant bases snapped as soon as it got some sun and kind of flapped there all summer with the plants just holding it (I tried to tie it, but kept coming loose), but resulted in a lot of evap and the plants never got as big and fruitful as the Smart Pots plants which were a lot less effort. Nope, not affiliated with this company in anyway, but I'll praise the product all day long.
