While my passion for tech has waned this year, my desire to grow organic food has blossomed (pun intended).

Given that I know nothing about growing food beyond tidbits of wisdom from tending a family garden as a child, I decided that 2025 would be my season(s) of experimentation. Using the same approach I discussed in Platform Engineering is Product Design at Scale, I knew a prototype would be useful in turning mountains of “things I read or watch on YouTube” into practical experience.

My end goal is to gain enough wisdom, insight, failure, and opinions to transform a large part of my lawn (grass) into an urban food farm.

This is my story so far.

Building a DIY Raised Bed Planter

I needed a place to start. A small, 4′ x 8′ planter seemed like the right size to perform my initial experiments. I didn’t want to build some massive garden only to find out that I had done it wrong and needed to move things around. Start small, learn from the experience, then scale it out.

There are many raised bed options available, from pre-made metal raised bed planters that cost hundreds of dollars and have all sorts of irrigation options built into them to DIY projects. Being that I’m in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 8b (this helps you understand temperature minimums and freezing likeliness) I figured metal planters might get a bit scorched from direct sun and cook the soil touching the metal. Also, using a minimal amount of water and money are important to me

So, I opted for DIY!

I chose a stack of 8′ pressure treated, ground contact rated pine boards sealed with a food-grade, plant based sealer for the sides of the planter. This should give me a good 5 – 10 years of life on the wood, or maybe longer, without any worries. By then I figure I’ll have moved on to some other design anyway.

I used concrete blocks for the corners (a few bucks each). They are formed with slots for the boards on all 4 sides, and have a small, 3/8″ hole in the center that can be used for a rebar anchor.

Just level, dig, clear, and drop! I also hammered a 6′ long section of rebar into each stack of blocks to make sure they weren’t going anywhere. 😉

Once I finished building the planter, which was only a few hours of work, I filled it up half way with “browns”. These are carbon pieces like old wood, leaves, sticks, and cardboard pieces like cut up boxes (mostly from Amazon deliveries) and drink carriers that don’t have ink, tape, or other pollutants in them. I also stuck a 6′ fence post on each side to act as a trellis using the Florida-weave method (more on that later).

The remaining layer was a mix of compost, sand (for aeration), and “black tea” (worm castings).

Learning to Grow Tomatoes

What to grow? How about tomatoes! My wife and I use a ton of them every week, so it felt like a smart thing to grow ourselves. But WOW did I pick one of the harder fruits to grow without even knowing it. 😜

I purchased seedling tomatoes from our local nursery and potted them to mature while I was working on the planter. I wanted to try out both determinate and indeterminate tomatoes, which basically mean bushy/small (you can easily “determine” what the plant will look like) and vine/long varieties (the end result is “indeterminate“, it grows as vine anywhere it can, up to 9′ or more!), respectively.

For the determinate, I went with Roma tomatoes for cooking, and for the indeterminate I went with Sun Sugar tomatoes for eating off the vine as a snack or using in salads.

Below is a Sun Sugar plant in his temporary home. Tomatoes love 🌞 sun and need relatively dry soil (they are anaerobic soil lovers and use the air in soil to regulate their nutrient flow). I trimmed off some dead palm tree fronds to act as a small stake to give the vine something to climb on.

Before planting, I conditioned a set of Olla pots. These are unglazed clay pots with a cork stopper that you bury up to the neck in soil. It’s best to soak them for a day or two first to drive out all the air pockets and dust. They act as submerged water reservoirs that the plant roots can wrap around for moisture (like sipping a cup with a straw) without all the down sides of wet roots (bacteria!) or evaporation from the sun. (In the future, I’ll get bigger ones – these need to be refilled every 2-3 days.)

I used marigolds and sweet basil as “companion plants” to help camouflage my fruit producers from pests. They produce a strong smell that helps mask and shade the tomatoes, and attract good bugs that eat bad bugs – I consider this “organic automation” because you’re using Nature to control Nature, rather than pesticides or other chemicals and plastics that should not be in your food!

I topped everything with a bit of local hardwood mulch. (In the future, I plan to add 3x – 4x more companion plants than what you see below. This is way too few! Lesson learned).

The Florida-weave is a trellis technique that is great for airflow. You 2 tie wires or ropes to your fence post on one side every 6″ – 12″, then “weave” them on both sides of each plant and secure them to the fence post on the other side. Alternate between each plant. This gently secures the plant in an upright position, keeps the leaves dry and away from the soil, and allows for a good amount of air flow. (I plan to try other trellis methods in the future, such as a hanging rope trellis and cages for the determinate tomatoes, but thought this was a good method to try for the first season).

Happy tomatoes grow like a weed. I added a new set of trellis lines every week during Spring.

For example, this is how one of the Sun Sugar plants looked like in early April:

Same Sun Sugar plant, a month later in early May:

The Great Hail Disaster

Towards the end of May I suffered a major setback in the form of 3″ – 4″ sized hail stones. This was a freak storm that we don’t normally see where I live.

The delicate plants were ripped to shreds and I lost my entire crop of developing tomato fruits.

Half of the marigolds died and all of the tomato plants had major wounds all along their branches and vines. I removed a few pounds of ice from the planter in order to take the photo below.

I can’t really convey how devastating this was. I was emotionally attached to these little guys. I woke up every day for months measuring them, recording notes, taking photos, measuring soil temperature and moisture, and eagerly awaiting my first tomato.

Seeing all this work killed (literally) was depressing. 😢

But, hey, that’s life. And that’s Nature. She’s brutal and heartless but also beautiful and wonderous.

I cleaned up the planter. I pruned away following the “3 Ds” – remove anything that is Dead, Diseased, or Damaged.

Most Companion Plants Return

The first plants to really come back were the sweet basil.

With there being 4 of them planted, there’s far too much for my family to eat. And I wanted them to grow and flower to help attract more pollinators (I love 🐝 bees!).

In about a month, or in late June, they looked like the photo below and were about 2′ tall and beginning to grow flower stalks on the top. (Note that normally you don’t want your sweet basil to flower, it makes the basil leaves taste more on the bitter side. If you’re growing sweet basil to eat, split it every “2nd knuckle” on the branch and keep it from flowering).

The second plant to show signs of life were the Marigolds. These are African Marigolds (Tagetes Erecta) and have such a lovely “pom pom” flower to them. They are far smaller than they should be in this time of the year due to the hail storm, but striving to grow bigger each day. They smell very sweet.

But what about the tomatoes?

Some Tomato Plants Return

I removed all of the plant wire and replaced it with 1/4″ hemp rope and started my Florida-weave trellis from scratch.

For the Sun Sugar (indeterminate, cherry tomato) vines, I chopped most of them back to prune away all the damaged vines. They had welts and big slashes across them from the sharp ice. This took months to heal.

I’m happy to say that one of the vines has started to produce fruit again. The vine grows tomatoes in a “string of pearls” configuration, where a branch grows covered in sequential flowers that, when pollinated, turn into these little beautiful tomatoes.

Sun Sugar tomatoes turn a golden yellow as they ripen, not red as you might be familiar with from other varieties. They taste AMAZING – sort of sweet, but definitely like a tomato, with a juicy “pop” as you bite into them.

For the Roma (determinate, bushy plants), I have 1 producing so far with the other one flowering and gaining in size. I must say, these tomato plants sure are hardy! The difficult thing about Roma tomatoes, or really any “larger” tomato that isn’t tiny like a cherry tomato, is their tendency to split. Tomato plants need an entirely different water schedule when they are fruiting – too little water and they don’t bear much in the way of fruit, too much water and the tomato fruit gets pumped full of water and split apart.

Worth It

Tasting my first Sun Sugar cherry tomato was euphoric and I can’t wait to harvest the Roma tomatoes.

So much hard work, failure, and learning to make just a handful of little bites of food. I never thought it would be this hard. I never thought about all the work that goes into our food before. But now I have such a deep appreciation for organic food. Now when I see fruits and vegetables at the farmer’s market, I see them with a different set of eyes.

I see the produce as a form of love, care, and attention that it takes for someone to do this kind of labor.

And when I see quality produce, I’m like “Hey! Tell me how you did this! What is your secret?” Because it’s HARD! 😁

Conclusion

So, there you go, that’s my story and one of the things I’ve been up to this year. I’ve fallen in love with organic gardening and creating food. I’ve learned a treasure trove of things about growing food, suffered a major defeat, and went down a redemption arc of regrowth and rejuvenation.

I now have those experiences and opinions I was seeking and have all sorts of ideas of what I’m going to do next to expand beyond this little prototype and into scaling out my food production. I want to grow a ton of different types of food – lettuce, squash, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, more basil varieties, and more – and expand my operations to include a large, DIY green house.

I hope you enjoyed this tale.

If there’s a moral to this story, it would be this: Sometimes you’re up, and then you’re down, and then the only thing to do next is clean up the mess and try again.

Peace

✌️&💙