KEYHOLE GARDENS

KEYHOLE GARDENS

I'm always a little late to the trend, style and taste included, but last year we experimented with this “new” concept of a keyhole garden. It's a idea that is being pushed in dry areas of the world like Africa. One of our misgivings about a garden out here in our dry, hot, and sandy desert is the large amount of water it takes to produce a tomato, egg plant, cucumber or whatever. I mean the cost of water alone could buy bushels of veggies at the market. Throw in fertilizer and time, well while I'd like to be all “green”, sustainable, and you know, kind to Mother Earth but economically it just doesn't make sense and I'm a poor man. So when I came across the keyhole idea from a Saturday morning presentation by the El Paso water company we decided to give it a try.

The concept is very simple. Create a somewhat raised garden so all plants can be reached within an arm's length. Make a place in the middle of the garden to put kitchen compost and water it. That's about it.

We chose to use sandbags, but the perimeter wall can be just about anything you can find, rocks, bricks, logs.

We found an old water purifier fiberglass tank, but some use wire or five-gallon buckets. Again your imagination for the container and what you have on hand is your basic limits for the container. Mainly it should hold compost and allow for drainage of water. As you can see I drilled holes in ours.

For the floor you put anything that will slow the water down but at the same time be porous. We used cardboard, sticks, leaves, paper and more.

On the inside of the walls we put up some tar paper to keep the moisture from getting to the sandbags.

Put about 12 to 18 inches of topsoil. (We used good old West Texas sand and some mulch)

Make a lid to put on the compost bin. Add the kitchen scraps. Sow the seeds and you're off.

The watering is done through the compost bin. ( We did cheat and water outside the bin until the sprouts came out.) The idea is that in 3^rd world countries they would dump their dishwater into the bin.

Early on you can see how pretty the cabbage, lettuce, peas and our one tomato plant are doing. We harvested lettuce, some peas, and tomatoes. The beautiful cabbage had been eaten badly by those beautiful white butterflies that visited. (actually, their larva and subsequent caterpillars) while we were on vacation. But that tomato plant grew and grew and grew and you can see in the photo of Kamala in front of the garden it had taken over the entire garden.

 By Autumn's end we had collected a bounty great tomatoes (and I love vine ripened tomatoes). When our first freeze hit I counted over 200 green tomatoes, golf ball size or bigger.

Our second keyhole-

We also tried another keyhole garden, but by digging down in the ground a couple of feet, throwing in cardboard, paper and leaves. We used some old earthen roof tiles to build up the sides to about a foot above the ground level. We used a 5 gallon bucket with holes drilled in the sides for the compost bin. Unfortunately the picture doesn't show off the construction very well but it does show it's production.

I should add to this little bit musings that neither of us have the gift of a green thumb, so while this is only our first year, not much of an experiment yet, it seems to me that the keyhole concept must be most important factor of success.

If you were really interested in making one these guys do a much better job of explaining it, visit

keyhold garden