Used wine barrels make excellent containers for a garden—they are heavy (and won’t tip in a storm), they weather well, they offer excellent drainage and breathability, and they add a pleasing look to your garden. This is the 3rd spring I have been using my barrels for, and they are still going on strong and solid as ever.
To prepare my half-barrels for planting, I originally had washed them out well and drilled 4 holes in the bottom. Before filling your barrels with soil, decide on what sunny location you will put your wine barrel garden, for a fully-loaded wine barrel weighs a ton and can only be moved around by dolly. For this round of planting peas, I put a bag of Rexis Potting soil in each barrel, and then finished off the top soil with a mixture of Rexius Chicken Compost and Rexius Garden Mulch. (Rexius happens to be the local green recycler in my neighborhood—it is so close I can smell that wonderful compost from my house when I walk outside. I encourage you to support your own local green recycler when you go to buy your soils and materials because the work they do is important!) Each barrel takes about 1.5-2 bags of dirt.
For the initial planting in this area, the Territorial Seed Company told me to get the peas in the ground by President’s Day (Feb 16). I was a few days late in planting, but I think they will still be okay. My pea mix is a coffee cup with Territorial Oregon Sugar Pod II Peas, Territorial Sugar Sprint Peas, and Ed Hume Oregon Giant Snow Peas. I chose all “bush type peas” because I wanted them to be able to grow in the wine barrel planters without any major trellising. While I wanted to try some legume inoculant for the first time (a coating you roll the peas around in before planting that is supposed to increase germination rate), everyone seemed to be sold out of it so i went along with this batch without it.
For this round, I just placed all the peas in big circles in the barrel, a few inches apart and a finger poke down.
Note: If you would like to trellis in a wine barrel, you can. You can either get something free-standing that goes into the barrel with stakes, or you can use a trellis netting. To use a netting, you’d need to place the wine barrel next to your roof or another structure. In the past, I have put a screw in either side of the barrel and attached the net on both sides with garden wire, and then used the screw/wire combo to attach it at the roofline or patio cover.
