I got an ad in the mail for EarthBox and they look interesting, but maybe a little too good to be true. Do they really work well enough to be worth the cost? Also, they say you don't have to use a pesticide with them but I can't see how the box prevents bugs from being attracted to your plants.
They will crack from freezing. Thats from experience. If you don't get freezing weather, grow and cold crop that is normal for your area. If you do get freezing weather, empty the water out.
They are amazing, my best friend had one last year and filled it with tomatos. I had the traditional garden and placed 6 tomato plants and maybe got one tomato. She had more tomatos than she knew what to do with. I would go over to her house and pick them. I don't know about other veggies but I think it should be the same. She loved the earthbox so much that she gave them as gifts this year. I sound like an ad for this company....
My roommate has 5 or 6 earth boxes and they are COOL! I don't think they stop pest problems, we still get snails and earwigs and slugs, but they are a great way to use the small amount of space you have for a garden. They're essentially like having a raised garden bed, so it's a bit harder for pests to get in there than if the plants were straight in the ground. There are a lot of ways for you not to use pesticides on a home garden. Generally, home gardens are fairly small and so easy to control pests in. At night, espeically wetter nights, I tend to wander outside and find all sorts of pests munching on the plants (in the earth boxes too), and I just pick them off and dispose (kill) of them. A great site to control pests without using pesticides (since that sounds like why you are attracted to earthboxes) is from the University of California, Davis at ipm.ucdavis.edu Anywho, I like our earth boxes as we have a small yard and stuff grows well in them, especially from seed!
