Many people use sacks to carry heavy loads. Sacks can protect, absorb and safely store varied items, but are usually discarded after use.
If you have limited space at home and would want to grow plants, sack gardening is the most home-friendly approach to use, Ismail Kambugu, a professional gardener says.
“Sacks keep soil in one spot and properly drained. It prevents soil from being washed off by agents of erosion. The tiny holes in the sacks also help to drain off excess water whilst allowing gaseous exchange to take place,” Kambugu explained.
In addition, he says one does not need to worry about weeding. With this style of gardening that has limited space, only the desired plants will be able to germinate. All that the gardener has to do is check the garden sacks once in two weeks for three months, to ensure that all the little weeds are removed before maturity.
This will help to eliminate any further weed re-growth. Weeds are also checked from the beginning, by ensuring that soil from shallow rooted and slow-growing weeds is mixed with organic manure, sand and broken bits of bricks or roofing tiles. The broken bricks help in getting plant nutrients to the roots by creating very minute paths in the soil that the nutrients will follow to the section of the sack that weeds will find unfavourable to grow.
Plants may seem confined in garden sacks, but this is good because less time is spent cleaning after fallen leaves. And when the same foliage is collected, it can be reapplied as manure.
Depending on what plants one grows, the soil can be half a sack or full. For crops like cassava, potatoes and tomatoes that can be harvested in intervals and have tap roots, full sacks would be the best while for vegetables like cabbages and spinach that have shallow roots, half soil sacks are ideal.
Sack gardens do not cost an arm and a leg in maintenance. They store enough water so there are less worries about watering. They can be placed anywhere, although they would better be placed in the backyard where plants can easily access light. They also require that the soil is softened so that it does not solidify to suffocate plant roots, by turning the soil once in a while, most especially before the next planting season.
