Drill the hole before you fill the pot

Some people do it the same way: heat a needle or a nail and push holes through the cap, so the jug pours a gentle spray instead of a flood that flattens seedlings — some people say the open spout is too much for anything small, and some people say the modified cap gives a mist. The details are from individual people and they disagree. Some people warn: do not hold the hot needle in bare fingers — pliers or a cloth — and some people say burning plastic smells and is not something to breathe; one person avoids heat altogether and twists a screwdriver through the soft cap instead, and people argue heat against twisting, with the decider being safety — burns and fumes — against how easily the harder plastics pierce. One person says pinprick holes spill more than you expect and too-large ones gush, and that a cone-shaped hole made by twisting regulates the flow; one person uses a power drill; one person says put a small air hole at the top of the handle so you do not have to squeeze the jug to pour. Other individual people use the same jug differently — one pierces a single hole and stands the bottle upside down in the soil for slow watering over several days, one cuts a bottle in half and inverts the top so water wicks up a string. One person fills the jug from the tap and leaves it a day before using it, on the theory that the chlorine leaves the water; that is one person, and this page did not check it. Whether the plastic of a given jug is safe in long contact with soil, how to cut it without leaving a sharp edge, and how long the holes last are not covered here.

It depends on what the wood was treated with, and people argue it hard, across some discussions, because a board’s treatment cannot be read from a photograph. So this page checked the authorities and gives you what they say instead of a vote. The concern is a preservative called chromated copper arsenate, CCA, which contains arsenic. In the United States the Environmental Protection Agency records that manufacturers stopped making it for homeowner uses in December 2003; in the United Kingdom and the European Union a 2003 directive stopped it being used for wood in gardens and public places from the middle of 2004. It is still made for utility poles, pilings and dock timbers, and existing structures did not have to come down. So: wood bought new for a garden after 2004 in either place is not arsenic-treated. The modern treatments are copper-based, and two university extension services checked this year say they are low in toxicity — one study found copper rose in the soil only within an inch of the bed’s edge and did not rise in the plants at all — so they are treated as acceptable for vegetable beds, with a heavy plastic liner between wood and soil offered as an option rather than a requirement. Old wood is the problem, and it is exactly the wood that turns up free. A fence, a deck or a pile of posts that was standing before 2004 may be arsenic-treated; one person says orange-tinted wood is the tell, and one person warns: do not grow food in it; one person says a green tinge is as likely to be algae or moss as treatment, and some people warn weathering hides the signs anyway, so colour is not a test. A home test for arsenic in wood is not covered here; nobody has one. The extension guidance adds railway sleepers and anything treated with creosote to the do-not list. The rule this page takes from all of it: if you know the wood was bought new after 2004, use it, liner optional; if you do not know its age, or it is orange-tinted, or it is a sleeper or a pole, grow flowers in it or use it for a bench, and grow food in something else — one person says new cedar is the fallback and that a local nursery gives better wood advice than a big shop. People on the other side are worth hearing: some people have used pressure-treated wood for beds without any trouble, and people on that side say the exposure from shop-bought produce is higher than from a bed. That may be so, and it is a reason not to panic about a bed already built, not a reason to build a new one from wood you cannot date.

People split on it, and the linked page called *Grow the herbs, not the potatoes* carries the arithmetic on whether a bucket of potatoes is worth growing at all — people here argue that question, some people on each side, and the answer is mostly no, unless you have no ground, or you want to. On the sprouting shop potato: one person says the ordinary shop varieties grow fine from a sprouting eye; one person says shop potatoes are treated so they will not sprout and may carry fungus, and that certified seed potatoes from a garden shop are the reliable route; one person warns a treated potato can give you no crop, and some people say a shop potato can bring blight or fungal spores into soil you will use again, which one person says is hard to get rid of. So: a shop potato that has sprouted on its own has already beaten the treatment, and it is a gamble with the soil, not with your health. If you plant, one person’s method: eyes up, add soil over the shoots as they rise until you reach the rim, let the leaves die back, then dig; one person points out you add potatoes only on day one and only soil after that; one person cuts a pail down or nests one cut pail inside another to take potatoes from the side, and another uses a fabric bag with a flap for the same reason, so nothing has to be tipped out — which one person warns is the messy part. Some people say the claim that a single bucket gives fifty pounds of potatoes is not credible — a bucket cannot hold fifty pounds of potatoes and the soil to grow them — and that any such figure is a year’s harvests, not one. Some people say leave dug potatoes in the sun for a day to toughen the skin. And if a potato has gone green, the page on reheating carries the safety line; do not eat the green ones.