Jackie Frobese

I wonder what they are resenting?

It was a fail in the end…

About 6 weeks after the tote was filled the screws began pulling free and/or snapping off.

The severity of the fail is not well seen with a quick glimpse at these pictures, but if you take your time to look closely, there are at least a dozen crews that have given out, the boards are pulling away completely at spots, and the tote itself is collapsing at the bottom.

If any one succeeds at building a cage I’d love to see it. I did not succeed.

Here it is full and holding. I’d say this framework is the minimum one could get away with. If you are thinking of duplicating I recommend adding more support. Larger pieces of wood and more of them.

Once the tote reached 2/3 full (about 200 gallons) the whole thing looked ready to fail. Several screws were pulled out, the plastic at the bottom was bulging. I decided to empty it so I could reinforce more. I’ll post pictures once the reinforcing is complete.

It’s raining… you can see my tote is about half full now. The bottom is definitely bulging on all sides. The lowest support on the front where the spigot is has started bowing. So far it’s all holding. I make a major miscalculation by failing to screw the center post on the house side into the pallet. You can see in the last picture it has pulled several inches away from the pallet. I failed to place the crew because of inaccessibility. I do t have a tractor to be able to move the whole setup myself so I built it in place😫☺️. Let’s just hope and pray it won’t be a fatal error.

The cross members on the front side are thicker, wider, and I used longer screws. Interestingly I did not intentionally put those ones on the "outside" of the corner posts. That's just how the whole assembly fit with the pallet below.

I do see what you all mean about the fact that they are outside, being a potential weak point. Since I can't easily move them inside, I think I'll add  vertical straps of wood over the ends, and screw them into the corner posts to reinforce the whole side.

Ill be picking up a flexible downspout today so I can begin collecting water.

As I was building this I had the top lid off with a piece of screen over the opening. I kept smelling what reminded me of dawn dish soap. I think there may be some soap residue inside the tank. I recall my neighbor (who purchased the tank, and is only using the cage for firewood) saying something about the tank being rinsed out and cleaned by the seller. Although this soap residue isn't optimal, given the mild nature of the scent I'm not thinking it'll be a real problem. I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts about that.

Ok final edition. Now we just have to wait for enough rain to fill it to see if it holds. Luckily there’s plenty of rain in my forecast.

Well I just grabbed some pieces of pallet wood and putting them together. This is what I came up with… I may be adding some more support at the top to tie the pieces together more.

Douglas, did you end up building a frame for your IBC liner? If so can you share a picture? I’m in exactly the same situation and would like to see the solution you came up with.

Hi All,

I moved into a new neighborhood a few years ago. I very quickly began growing my own food. Planting fruiting trees and bushes, creating coppices for wood heat, just generally doing my permies thing. At the beginning of this year my neighbor announced they will be putting in some raised beds and asked for my help, boy was I excited!!!

They even built the beds in a permaculture way using reclaimed fencing and filling them with horse manure from our other neighbor. Below  are some pictures of their very productive beds.

The new garden was so productive they said they plan to add some more beds for next year! And now Shauna, my neighbor is even talking about planting some blueberry bushes.

Meanwhile we together reclaimed a very overgrown 2’X4’ raised bed, that didn’t work out so well for them before (it was a dry and hard to water location). I planted some more hearty and drought tolerant herbs there. She is loving it!  

Just goes to show that leading by example does work!