Purple Carrots

After finding trash buried in the little garden behind the garage I decided that I wanted to do a carrot container garden this year. I already purchased carrot seeds and I've really been looking forward to growing carrots. I have been perusing the bins at the store and scrounging around my house for about two weeks trying to find some sort of container to plant the carrots in. My goal, if I had to spend money, was to pick up something for under $3. I couldn't find anything at the store I work in for less than $6 but I've been looking every single day hoping to stumble on some great find.

Today little Abe and I were in the basement putting clothes in the wash when he points to a purple storage tote that's been sitting in the middle of my laundry area portion of the basement ever since I started the basement clean up. My kiddo out of the blue asks, "mom, what's that?"

I'm too cheap to purchase storage totes. I think we have one or two very large ones upstairs in our attic that my husband and I packed some of our childhood things into around the time we first moved into this house. Other than those two though, we don't have any storage totes. We just re-use boxes for anything we need to pack up. Sluggy would be very proud of me, haha! 

So the rather hideous purple one that came with my father in laws small assortment of Christmas decorations after he passed was apparently invisible to me? Ah ha! I responded, "THAT my son is a carrot garden!" Okay, I don't think I actually said that but I did jump for joy and thank him for pointing the thing out to me. How had I not thought of using that? I've been wanting to get it out of the basement for months. I have a strange dislike for the color purple. It is my mom's favorite color and she always tried to dress me in purple clothes when I was little and I really disliked them for some reason. Maybe because my favorite color was blue.

My backyard this year is going to be unsightly but I LOVE it! There are carrot seeds planted in that purple bin now. I did run to the store again today (even though I'd planned a no spend day). I picked up peat for the carrot garden, a light bulb for our hallway, and fixins for chili (just to have another meal and get the price up to $12). I used a $12 store reward and spent $1.57 oop.

I did not plant purple carrots (as implied by the title) but my purple carrot garden will probably lead me to calling my carrots "purple carrots" all year and I might not have such a dislike for purple if this thing produces beautiful long orange carrots this summer.

For the record, I punched several triangle shaped holes in the bottom of the bin. I put about a one inch layer of river stones at the bottom. Then I mixed together an organic garden soil with peat. We'll see...