Constructing the Garden Sink

I've admitted many times before, I'm not a carpenter.  Sometimes, however, I get a hankering to complete a project that needs doing.  Wouldn't a garden sink be marvelous?  Tricia's old cast iron sink that was in the kitchen was removed after 25 years of service.  Although not a hoarder, I do like to save things that I think I may be able to repurpose.  I threw the old sink in the very back of the garden where it sat under the sugarcane patiently for over a year for me to make the decision to attempt the project that I had earmarked for it upon removal.  Last week, I pulled it from the garden and looked at it.  It didn't look good, but if I squinted my eyes, I could see potential there.  It's as if the old sink desired to be useful again.  Can we make that happen?

A garden sink would be so useful.  No more bringing in vegetables indoors for processing.  Vegetables that were dirty from harvest would get dirt and mud all over the place in Tricia's kitchen.  Vegetables that had stink bugs, spiders, slugs and snails clinging to them that would now be in the kitchen.  I searched and searched for plans online that would direct me on how to build it.  Oh, there were numerous plans and videos, but none were exactly what I saw in my mind's eye.  So I decided to build it without official plans.  I'd play it by ear, I'd fly by the seat of my pants, so to speak, in its construction.

The goal was to build it with lumber I had laying around.  This is what I roughed in.  As you can see, it's supported by a solid 4x4 frame supported by 2x4's, braced for sturdiness.  It would have a hardware cloth area for draining the cleaned vegetables.  I originally had ideas for a cutting board, but since this is going into the garden, I had a last-minute plan change to keep the garden sink reasonable in size.  I'll show you the workaround cutting board in a minute.

I was pleased with how this thing was taking shape.  Tricia liked that this would keep her kitchen cleaner.

I purchased the cheapest kitchen sink with sprayer from the local hardware store for fifty dollars.  Russ, my plumber son, helped me to pipe it all in.  The water run-off from the sink was plumbed to be caught in a blue tub.  That water that contained precious topsoil would be returned to the garden.  Either that or I would add chopped vegetable greens and stalks to the water and a little manure to manufacture my own fertilizer.  I'll show you that in another blog post sometime later.  The water source comes from a water hose connected by fittings to the sink.  It's not hard-piped in.  Since there's no hot water, I capped off the hot water portion of it.  I also added some 2x2 slats the have a shelf of sorts on the bottom for storage.  Doing so also added more stability to the garden sink.  We moved it out to the garden.

Time to test it out.  We had some Danvers carrots, Cosmic Purple Carrots, Detroit Red beets, and Chioggia beets ready for pickin'.  I pulled them, put them in the sink and washed and scrubbed them real good.

Using a makeshift cutting board that I placed over one of the sinks, I cut the greens off.  Of course with cows and goats nosing around, I fed the greens to them.

Chioggia beets remind me of Brach's Starlight Mints, one of my favorite mints, especially good to pop in your mouth when you are about to leave church in order to combat "church breath."  Church breath is a dreaded affliction one gets from sitting in church singing hymns and listening to the sermon, and starlight mints is the cure for it, I've found.  Chioggia beets, unlike starlight mints, aren't minty, but they are tasty.

The garden sink worked in splendid fashion to wash up the vegetables.  Total cost of the garden sink was less than $100.  As a result of having the sink, we were able to bring cleaned veggies into the house that were ready to be processed further without making a mess indoors.

Inside, we sliced these root vegetables into 1/4 inch slices, tossed them in olive oil and roasted them in the oven with butter and salt and pepper.  It was a good day and I've got to give the roasted vegetables AND the new garden sink good reviews.  The vegetables for taste and the garden sink for functionality.