6 things to check before you buy a planter to grow your own veg

If you're growing anything you'll eat, start here, because it's the worry that keeps people up at night. You chose wood because it felt natural, and now you're not sure what's been sprayed on it. As one gardener asked, plainly, "is it safe to grow an edible plant in it? It doesn't say what the wood has been treated with." Another had already worked out the trap: "either get toxins from whatever the wood is sprayed with or toxins from whatever I line the wood with."

And the treatment isn't always subtle. A reviewer of a cheap import warned: "what they treat it with really stinks, so leave it outside when built to get rid of the smell." If you can smell it, it's coming off the wood and into the air around your plants.

So check what it's actually treated with, and whether it's safe for soil and edibles from the day it arrives. The Sussex is treated with Timbac, our own non-toxic, water-and-wax treatment. It is not tanalised and not pressure-treated, which are the things people worry about leaching into food. It's safe around edibles, pets, soil and children from day one, with nothing to air off. If you grow anything you'll eat, this is the check that decides it.

Most people's answer to the treatment worry is to line the inside with plastic. It feels safe until you think it through. One gardener who'd chosen wood "because I wanted something natural" admitted, "I'm not 100% sure I want the plant to now be contaminated with microplastics." You picked wood to avoid plastic round your food, and the standard fix puts plastic right back.

It doesn't even last. As another gardener found, a cheap membrane "will degrade within two years. The fabric will then fall to bits and get mixed in with your compost." So you do the fiddly job of cutting and stapling a liner, and two years later you're picking shreds of it out of the soil your veg is growing in.

So check whether the planter comes lined, and lined properly. The Sussex arrives with the liner already fitted at the workshop, the right liner for the job, so water drains where it should and the timber stays protected, with nothing for you to cut, staple or replace down the line.

Drainage is where good intentions go wrong. Everyone arrives at the same question, "do I need to put some holes in the bottom to allow for drainage… how many and what size?", and then reaches for the old trick of chucking a layer of gravel or rocks in the bottom. Don't. It does the opposite of what you'd think. As the gardening experts put it, "adding rocks to the bottom of a planter raises the water table, leaving roots in soggy soil and increasing the risk of root rot." Your "drainage layer" becomes a paddling pool.

And waterlogged roots are quietly fatal. As the RHS puts it, "plant roots literally drown." They can't breathe in saturated soil, and the plant goes from healthy to dead without ever looking thirsty, which is heartbreaking when it's a crop you've grown from seed.

So check that drainage is designed in, not left as a DIY job for you. On the Sussex, the slatted base and the built-in liner work together: water drains away through the base instead of pooling, and the roots don't sit in standing water. Nothing to drill, no gravel myth to fall for. You plant it, you water it, and the water knows where to go.

If you've owned a wooden planter that rotted, look at where it went first. It's almost never the top. It's the bottom, the boards in contact with the ground. One gardener put it plainly: "the first bottom boards are now rotting and have become bowed where they have detached from the supports." That's the classic failure, and on a planter full of damp compost it happens fast.

Here's the part nobody selling cheap planters will tell you. Wood doesn't rot because it's wood. It rots because the base sits in trapped water, day and night, with nowhere for the wet to go. As the experienced lot on the gardening forums say, "wood in contact with soil will rot really quickly." So the question isn't "is it wood?" It's "does the base ever get to dry out?"

That's why the Sussex sits on a slatted raised base, built in. Water and air pass underneath, so the bottom never sits wet. Nothing to prop on bricks, no pot feet to buy. And it's backed by our 2-year guarantee with no exclusions, which covers anti-rot as well as manufacturing defects. Check this one closely, because it's the single thing that decides whether your planter sees more than a winter or two.

Here I'll be straight with you, even though it might cost me the sale. The Sussex is a raised trough planter, around 219mm deep, in 2ft, 3ft and 4ft lengths. That depth is ideal for the things most people grow on a patio or small plot: herbs, salads and cut-and-come-again leaves, strawberries, spring onions, bush and patio tomatoes, chillies, dwarf beans. Line a path or edge a bed with two or three and you've got a proper little kitchen garden in a weekend. As one owner did: "bought 3 x 3ft planters to edge the patio off. Perfect sizing."

So check the depth against your crop, not just the look. For the herbs-salads-and-patio-veg most people actually grow, the Sussex is exactly the right tool. For a deep root crop, it isn't, and now you know.

Read the one-star reviews of cheap planters and the complaints aren't really about the wood. They're about the work. "Product requires sealing before use. A bit fiddly to assemble. Had to buy a spray sealant before use," wrote one buyer. A flat-pack to build, a sealant to buy and apply, a liner to cut and fit, bricks to prop it on, none of which was in the price they thought they were paying. Then there's the other half of it: when the bottom boards rot, who exactly do you talk to? Behind a lot of planters there's no maker at all, just a marketplace listing and a brand name you can't find anywhere else.

So check what actually turns up, and who stands behind it. The Sussex arrives fully assembled, with Timbac already applied, the liner already fitted and the drainage built into the base. You lift it out of the box, set it down, add soil, and plant. As one owner put it: "excellent well made sturdy looks great came assembled." It's designed, built and dispatched from our own workshop in Kent, where the family has been building wooden housing since 1982, and we're a member of Made in Britain. You can find us, and you can hold us to the 2-year guarantee.