We weren’t that interested in gardening in our land life. Our yard maintenance efforts were sporadic at best, usually done when weeds were knee high and the house hard to see. There was this one time that we grew a real jack-and-the-beanstalk weed that reached over one story high and had to chopped down with an axe. We were proud in an odd kind of way of how high that one grew. I joked that if it lasted until Christmas I’d hang some fairy lights on it.

When we started planning our life aboard Tygress we knew that we wanted some herbs and plants aboard, ones that wouldn’t need mowing, trimming or chopping down with an axe.

While we’re cruising we may not always have access to fresh veggies and herbs so we wanted to have some self sufficiency, a little green luxury in our diet. Like fresh chives with our scrambled eggs. Lettuce and sliced tomato with our canned ham sandwiches or maybe in a salad. Fresh basil with pasta sauces or some fresh parsley and dill for our fish. You get the picture.

Since moving aboard we’ve been experimenting with different herbs, pots and containers and places to keep them.

At the moment we have basil, flat leaf parsley, curly parsley, tomatoes, chives, olive herb and aloe vera and today I planted some lettuce and rosemary.

Space is an issue on a boat along with salt spray and budgetary constraints so one has to get creative and seek out of the box solutions for growing a garden. And I’m pretty proud of mine! For the price of a two litre bottle of milk you can make your own hanging containers for growing herbs that hang perfectly on the life lines, plus you get the luxury of fresh milk!. In the photos below I’ll show you how you can make your own.

Materials: One two litre milk bottle, stanley knife, a pair of scissors, a marker

Some things to note:

I’ve probably cut the openings of this milk bottle too low. For yours you’ll want to leave enough depth for a good amount of dirt and space for root growth. For this bottle I’ll plant a shallow rooted herb such as thyme.

Don’t forget to poke some drainage holes in the bottom at the lowest points in the plastic where the water will collect the most.

Don’t cut too close to the sides, you’ll want thick support struts so the bottles don’t buckle. If they do buckle while hanging just set it down somewhere for a few days and it should right itself.

And here’s how they look after a few months growth.

We’ve gotten quite a few comments from fellow liveaboards and passers by about our little herb garden, in particular my bottles. Opinion seems to be split 50/50 between “Wow, what a great idea, they’re coming along nicely” and “Won’t work, they’ll die, salt in the air will kill ’em, give up”. The latter just make us more determined to see our little garden thrive. True our plants haven’t been sailing yet, so maybe they’ll struggle, but we plan on hanging them on the towel racks in the head and keeping the others under the spray dodger while under way. We think their odds of survival are good. So check back and watch our garden grow.