Mom called me all excited one day in late summer. “You gotta come over and look at my corn! You won’t believe how good it looks.” Yeah, right. She’s growing corn in southwest Florida and she expects me to think it looks good. I had already learned the hard way that if I wanted a garden, it had to be some type of gardening in containers and I sure couldn’t conceive of any container that would be suitable for growing corn. However, being a good daughter, I told my mother I’d be over as soon as I finished watering my tomatoes. And so it was that I was walking skeptically with my parents a short time later, around the house and into their back yard to inspect this wonderful corn crop. As we rounded the corner of the house I saw a patch of tall deep green plants and I stopped, speechless. It was indeed corn and it did indeed look really good. Good as in, tall, deep rich green all the way to the surface of the garden container, silks just starting to show at the leaf joints. I rarely had corn looking that good back in Ohio which is definitely a part of the “corn belt” in this country. Okay, so how did she do it? I got up close and personal with the corn crop. It was planted way closer than I’d ever do in a standard garden and in fact, it was planted just about 4 inches apart in two rows. That box was just jammed full of corn plants and every one of them was as uniform as its neighbor. There were quite a few of these boxes all lined up in a double row (for easy watering and better pollination, I was told) which meant that small area had as many corn plants as I normally grew in a much larger piece of ground. And all of it looked just fine. Summer progressed and Mom and Dad enjoyed all the sweet corn on the cob they wanted, all fresh picked from their backyard container garden. The secret, I learned, was the dark green rectangular box they grew in. Enter the Earth Box, a marvelous solution for easy container gardening. Each box held about one large bag of potting soil (2 cubic feet) and came with a built-in 3 gallon water reservoir so constant monitoring in our Florida heat was no longer necessary. Each came complete with easy planting instructions so that even the worst gardening dummy could turn out a nice productive garden. Mom had tomatoes in Earth Boxes, peppers, cabbage, green beans…. you name it. Mom had a real garden and none of it was in the ground. The Earth Box is a rather ingenious outfit that takes most of the guesswork out of container gardening. It’s not a big huge thing, measuring only 30 inches long x 15 inches wide, but it packs a lot of produce into that small space. Fertilizer is placed in a strip between the plants, actual placement varying with the plant arrangement, and then a cover is secured to top it all off. That’s it… once you add your seeds or plants, of course. All you do after that is water regularly and stand back ready to shout “Whoa!” when your garden takes off. Yes, you can make a pretty decent version of this growing system yourself, using readily available materials from the local big box store. However, here in the hot Florida sun I learned pretty quickly that those homemade boxes simply don’t hold up as well. I got about 2 years’ use out them as opposed to my now 8 years’ with the Earth Boxes. And they’re still going strong with no sign of deterioration whatsoever. Well… except for the one I planted a banana tree in. That one is bulged out in one spot and a particularly vigorous root actually broke through the plastic. I’ve tried a variety of containers for my garden but I keep going back to the Earth Box. Simply put…. it works.