Specialty Gardening: Big Pot Planting Advice Wanted, 1 by GoldenDomer

GoldenDomer wrote:
Since the topic of this Forum is Container Gardening, I thought I'd start my series of reports with the whiskey barrels and the big unexpected problem we had. I bought these 1/2 barrels in mid February wanting to be ready for an early March planting weather permitting. As it turned out they were in my storage for a month and a half.

I had room for one in my heated pantry and the other had to go to the unheated garage. In mid March I first noticed that the cold had contracted a couple slats (top pic) on the garage barrel but I felt that would be only a minor repair job on potting day. How I wrong I was,

As it turns out the barrels are made so each slat holds all the others in place. One missing slat will loosen (weaken) all the others -- two missing slats would be a certain problem. The second picture in the this first stack shows you what happened when my handyman tried to pick it up -- it collapsed like a house of cards.

The pictures tell the story better than I can.