Let's Patch's self-watering planter folds small enough to fit in your mailbox. Order yours through their Kickstarter campaign by Friday, June 14 to help fund their project. We just moved to a new home in February and after not even having a patio for a few years, we now have a massive outdoor space with a terrace and our very own garden. It’s so amazing, I have to pinch myself every day.

I’ve been so excited to grow our own food – herbs like basil are crazy delicious but expensive to purchase at the grocer – but hadn’t got around to it until yesterday.

Mostly what was holding me back was the fact that plants don’t seem to stay alive under my care. We bought a bunch of houseplants when we were first married, almost 11 years ago, but they quickly died and I guess we sort of lost our nerve.

So when I heard about Let’s Patch, I jumped at the chance to try their user-friendly, self-watering planter, whose founder, Vancouverite Kent Houston, “was fuelled by the idea that anyone could grow food, anywhere.”

See Houston talking about Let’s Patch in the video below.

Houston says, “Let’s Patch was founded to give people the tools they need to grow healthy herbs and vegetables at home. We believe that if you grow it, you’ll eat it” – a philosophy that’s especially important to today’s children who’ve become dangerously disconnected from the source of their food (as most of us have).

To this end, Let’s Patch has donated 150 planters to 32 BC classrooms participating in the Classroom Gardening Program run by Growing Chefs! Chefs for Children’s Urban Agriculture.

The lightweight planter, made from Tyvek (a durable, water-resistant, recyclable synthetic made from high-density polyethylene fibres), arrived in an envelope in my mailbox, measuring 12 inches by 6 inches by 1 inch.

I took my gardening assistant (my labradoodle Charlie) to GardenWorks to pick up potting mix and a basil starter plant – seeds seemed too challenging for my first real gardening project and apparently I’d already missed the prime time to plant seeds anyway – and then I assembled the planter, without incident, in less than five minutes.

Ta-da! My precious little basil plant soaking up the sun (and the perfect amount of water from its Patch Planter) on my patio.

The indoor/outdoor planter is sleek enough to sit on your coffee table or windowsill and durable enough to sit on your patio. Mine is now perched on a window ledge outside my office window, so I can gaze out at my food-growing aptitude and, one day soon, clip the fragrant leaves to serve on my adjacent patio table.

Patch Planters can be purchased through Let’s Patch’s Kickstarter campaign, which hopes to raise $50,000 by Friday, June 14, 2013 at 3:00AM. With only 8 days left, 50 percent of their goal has been pledged, so they need another $25,000 for the project to be funded.

“With Kickstarter we can bypass investors, get real metrics about our market and showcase the forward-thinking innovation behind our self-watering Patch Planters,” says Houston. “We need to go from beta to mega to make this game-changing method of growing food a reality and make a positive impact on communities around the world.”

Visit letspatch.com for more information about the Patch Planters, and head to Kickstarter to purchase one planter for $38, two for $69, or three for $98.