The Chatelaine's Keys

Sharon February 10th, 2009

Those of who know me in real life will probably already have noted that organization isn’t my strong suit.  So how to keep up with all the garden tasks is a chronic problem of mine.  I get particularly muddled in late spring, when there are plants to be seeded outside, tender crops to be hardened off in cold frames, and long-growing fall garden plants like brussels sprouts to be seeded for transplant later…. Gack!  I have a garden record book, of course, but that meant digging it out every day to see what I’m supposed to be doing and to do that I have to find the garden record book… .

 And then I discovered the garden calendar.  What a miracle it was – I realize this is one of those “duh” things that probably most of you have figured out, but for me, it was such a revelation that I can’t resist sharing. 

What you want is a regular old monthly calendar.  You can buy a pretty one on sale in late January, when they go to 75% off, since at least in my climate, you probably won’t need it until then, or you can simply print a copy off the web.  The point being, however, unless you have a very small garden, you need a calendar entirely devoted to the garden.

Then, you sit down and write.  I start by counting back 12 weeks from my last frost date (you can find this out from your local extension).  That’s when I start my earliest plants indoors (actually, I usually start a few greens before that, but they are few enough to not worry about).  I then list off every variety of plant that gets started that early – in this case, onions, leeks, scallions, a few early greens (to be planted in the boxes on the sunporch), hollyhocks, two tomatoes (for early container tomatoes), and a pot of nasturtiums (for early flowers).  Next, we move forward to 11 weeks, when I start most of the perennial herbs and flowers that I want to produce the first year.  Then to 10 weeks…9…8… and so on until the very last things I start indoors – melons that get just a couple of week’s head start before the really warm weather kicks in here.  Since we’ve had snow in late May a couple of times, it is safer to keep them in until the second week of June.

And I don’t stop at my last frost date – because remember, I’m succession planting year round.  So I put down the date I start my fall spinach and other greens – it is hot enough that they do better started in the house, which is a bit cooler.  I want container tomatoes that produce through December, so those get started come May, along with some late chard and kale.  Generally fall crops in my climate need to get started in July or August – the sort of thing I definitely forget if I don’t write them down.  And then there are plants that do best from seed and overwintered – nuts and trees often do best planted from seed in a nursery bed and left out for the winter with some mulch.  Those get planted in October.

Now I go through all the plants I’m going to direct seed, from the very first onions and peas in April (for all you people planing them now, yeah, I’m jealous ), to the last crop of spinach direct seeded in early September to be overwintered.  I list an approximate date – but remind myself that if things dry up early in late March, I can put the peas in then.  This does require some knowledge of your place – you can start by using recommended dates from your local extension, and adapt them as you go. 

One way you develop this local knowledge is to keep track of the weather, and that’s something else we use this calendar for – we use it to jot down the first robins in January, the temperature fluctuations in March, rainfall, etc…  All that info eventually gets transferred into the garden record book, but I found that if I had to dig out the book, it often didn’t get written down at all, in the assumption that I’d just remember it.  Guess what – I didn’t.

Then I add other project information.  Ok, so I ordered some fruit trees – I have the habit of ordering trees online, and forgetting when I requested that they be sent.  And thus, the string of “oh, craps” when the box of fruit trees arrives to be planted just as we’re neck deep in some other project.  This way, when I flip to May, I can see that the apples are coming.

Pruning goes on the list.  Fruit trees in January and early February, the lilac bush after flowering.  So do animal projects – we put down the goat due dates, the days our chicks are expected to arrive and the day by which we need to have cleaned out the barn from winter.  Now this doesn’t always make me do these projects on time, but the site of the list of projects for May makes me realize that getting this done in March is going to make me a lot happier.

Do I ever ignore the calendar?  Sure, I do.  But the good thing about it is that if I don’t get the ageratums and sweet peas started on the week I listed, it is easy to draw an arrow down to the next week as a reminder.  I’ve also found that it saves me work on the other end – no need to write in the garden records “started broccoli” on a particular date – I can just flip back to the calendar and see when broccoli was on the list.  If there’s no arrow, I actually started broccoli – yay!

One additional trick I’ve learned is that after I’m done organizing the calendar, I make shoeboxes – now this might be overkill for those of you with small gardens, but for me, it is a great help.  Each box is labelled with a week (made ‘em a while back), and if you were a different kind of person than me, you might cover them with pretty cloth or paint – mine still look like shoe boxes.  But for each week, there is a box of seeds – thus, I don’t have to go hunting for the Hokkaido Blue Squash seeds when I’m ready to plant them out.  I divide the box into “direct seed” and “start indoors” sections for each week.  For someone with a smaller garden, one shoe box with a set of dividers for each week might be sufficient.

Now if this sounds like an enormous amount of work, the other good thing is that you only have to do it once.  You see, next year, you can take last year’s calendar, and with a few amendments (ie, you remember that you should have started the kale earlier and the container tomatoes later), you can just copy it all over to next year’s calendar.  I save them, too, because I enjoy seeing them and comparing notes from previous years.

For me personally, the “hanging on the wall in front of your nose” method of showing what has to be done and what has been done is the only one that works.  I offer it up to the similarly organizationally challenged!

Sharon

• garden design , organizing
• Comments(4)

Sharon February 10th, 2009

I’m mulling over what corn to grow this year.  I want it to be open pollinated, and in the green stage, sweet, probably as sweet as a moderate hybrid.  I’d like it to have good cold soil emergence, a quick maturity date, but a good extended harvest in the green stage.  I want something with a good bit of genetic diversity and an interesting color – green, red, or multicolored.  In the dry stage, I’d like it to parch superbly, grind into delicious cornmeal and also pop into delicate, light popcorn.  It should be easy to shell, but have a good, tight husk to keep out earworms, tolerate wet, cold, dry, hot and variable conditions, and produce a heavy crop, with five or six ears to a plant in dense plantings. 

Just in case you don’t realize it, that list is, well, insane.  That is, no one will ever breed a corn with all of those qualities – it isn’t possible.  The hard coating that makes a popcorn great means that in the green stage, it is never as tender as sweet corn.  On the other hand most corns as sugary as present day hybrids would never make good flour – they would mold instead of drying.  There are corns adapted to hot, cold, variable, wet and dry conditions – but not all at once.  There are some that can tolerate quite a range of conditions, because they’ve been selected for that quality – but that means that other qualities probably weren’t as high a priority.

And yet, if you read garden catalog copy, you might get the impression that the perfect corn or tomato or bean is out there, without compromise. It isn’t totally my fault that on some level I’m still looking for the perfect corn, rather than one whose compromises I can live with – just listen to the catalogs trumpeting “Most exciting introduction in human history!  Better than the domestication of the potato!  This melon stores for seven months at room temperature, perfumes a room and is delicious even after being on the compost pile for 3 weeks – the molds growing upon it are a traditional delicacy!”  Ok, maybe I exaggerate just a little – but not much.

If it were just seed varieties that had this problem we could all shrug our shoulders, but in gardening and farming, the “I want it all” disease tends to permeate our lives.  We want our gardens to be full of a huge variety of annual and perennial crops and have no weeds at all.  We want to emphasize calorie crops in a survival garden and also emphasize high value fruits and vegetables to save money.  We want to raise every animal imaginable – a couple of llamas, goats, a cow, five sheep, ducks, of course, chickens, bunnies, oh, and bees and maybe some pigs….

And all those ambitions are doable – I even know people who do them all.  But most of us, with limitations of space and time are probably going to find that we have to compromise.  For example, a lot of us want to be able to live off our gardens if times get tough – that means growing dense calorie crops – dried beans, nuts, root crops and some small grains.  The thing is, these crops take up space in our garden – and right now, most of us can buy these items pretty cheaply.  On the other hand, lettuce, basil, tomatoes, raspberries, peaches…these are not so cheap per pound.  So do we emphasize high value crops, or do we emphasize calorie crops?  Or do we compromise?  If you’ve got all the space and time in the world, you probably can grow all your potatoes, beans, corn and sweet potatoes, and also all the raspberries and lettuce you want.  But what about those of us on smaller plots, with less physical ability or time?

Well, you might need to cut your produce bill right now more than you need to prepare for TEOTWAWKI.  Or you might feel like you enjoy growing beans, corn and sweet potatoes enough that you are content with that priority.  Or maybe you have just one bed devoted to those crops, just so you know how to grow them if times get tough, while you mostly grow tomatoes and lettuce.

You want an enormous subsistence garden with no weeds, right?  Well, there are things you can definitely do to resist weed pressure – sheet mulching, not disturbing the soil.  But unless you’ve got nothing to do but hoe, the bigger the garden, the more likely it is that you’ll have weeds – while the lambsquarters can’t sneak past you in a 4×6 raised bed, you’ll find that your 1/4 acre garden has quite a few sneaky places for crabgrass to grow.  And it might be possible that you do want to do something besides hoe.  So guess what – welcome to weedland.  I remember visiting Old Sturbridge Village and being told by a gardener that they are constantly criticized for letting the weeds go in their gardens, and are often told that this couldn’t have been a common practice, because, after all, people relied on their gardens.  But in fact, the gardeners there observed that it was quite the contrary – weediness was normal, and as long as the weed pressure didn’t undermine the harvest too much, it wasn’t worried much about. 

Want a forest garden?  Great, that’s a terrific project.  Just remember, though, you’ve now decided to emphasize perennial plantings, which means that even if you scatter in annuals, you’ll probably have to wait a while before major production.  That’s not the end of the world – time passes faster than you think.  But it is worth remembering that your harvests won’t get large for a while in many cases, and that most perennial crops are fruits, nuts and greens  – you probably won’t be getting most of your primary calorie crops from that garden unless you eat a lot of Jerusalem artichokes.  Nothing wrong with that – just worth remembering that there are tradeoffs everywhere.

What about animals?  Well, again, if you live on a farm, love animals and want to, you can have a lot of them.  I know someone living on 5 acres in quite a dense suburb who has more animals on her lot than I do.  But you have to want that – and it has to be a priority.  And the time, energy and feed has to come from somewhere.  Then you have to find a market for the animal – or arrange to butcher it.  Or accept that you have 143 pet rabbits .

It isn’t that I’m trying to discourage anyone from practicing polyculture, or from diversifying – quite the contrary, what I absolutely don’t want to see is everyone specializing in just one item and growing it over and over again.  We live in a society with far too much specialization.  The fact we’re generalists is, I think a virtue.  But even generalists often find that they have to pick and choose.  And anyone who tells you that their strategy doesn’t have any prices is selling something.

Maybe you can do it all – you are young, healthy, have a strong back and a lot of energy.  Great – enjoy it.  But even that’s a choice – you’ll be devoting your life to growing food. Now I can’t think of a better project for some people – but other people have other callings, and they need to to find ways to grow food that don’t take so much time and energy.  The world needs more people who grow food, especially full time – but it also needs teachers and musicians and nurses and carpenters who grow food on the side.  Someone with less time who wants to grow all their own food may need to change their diet to emphasize easily produced crops, or they may be able to say “ok, I’m content to produce half my meat and all my vegetables – and that’s enough.”  Knowing when to say “enough” is important too.  Now what is enough today may not be tomorrow – so being prepared to shift gears is important.  But we have to live with one foot in the future, but the other still in our present. 

The first project of garden design is dreaming, but the second is shaping your dreams to fit your life.  Most of us will have to choose between the perfect garden for the future and the perfect one for today, between animals and resources, between crops and varieties.  And every time we choose we give something up – and get something back.  The trick is to figure out what you really care about, and make sure you give up mostly things that don’t matter much to you, and that you get back the things that matter most – most of the time.

I think I’ve found my ideal corn – black aztec.  It is a corn that is sweet in the milk stage – not as sweet as most of the hybrids, or quite as tender, but tasty.  You’ve got to move fast to get it then, but we can do that.  It handles our cool, wet climate well, and as I save seed, it gets better adapted to my garden.  At the meal stage, it is sweet – not quite as sweet as my favorite dry corn “northstine dent”, but better than that as a green corn.  It is beautiful and tasty, and makes lovely cornmeal.  And for popcorn, well, I grow a second variety just for popcorn.  And when the corn passes the milk stage, I go down the road and buy sweet corn at my local farmstand.  It is almost perfect – although I’m still probably going to try another variety this year, simply because I can’t resist the temptation of finding something even better.  But even if I do, I won’t fool myself that I have it all.   Just enough for me and my needs.

 Sharon

• garden design , seeds
• Comments(6)

Sharon February 5th, 2009

The Jewish Holiday of Tu B’Shevat, the New Year of the Trees (yup, Jews have a special holiday for trees – it is their birthday!) is coming up, and in homeschool this week, we read  _Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai_.  It tells the story of Maathai’s Green Belt movement, and its role in reclaim land from desertification in Kenya. 

When we finished the story, Isaiah said, “I don’t want us to cut down too many trees for our stoves, because then the soil would wash away like it did in Kenya.”  I assured him that we have enough firewood without taking down healthy trees, and that protecting our forest is very important to us. But I was secretly pleased that he grasped the reality of the role of trees not just in “the world” but was able to understand how it affected *his* world. 

In _Depletion and Abundance_ I wrote about the acute need to get our children into relationship with nature – but not nature out somewhere in the distance, but the complex, sometimes damaged and grubby but very real nature that they are embedded in:

“…we have to preserve nature in our man-made landscapes.  We must, in some literal and metaphorical way open up the boundaries of the enclosures and let our children out into their own world.  We cannot expect our children to be attached to a nature that is majestic, transcendent, and “over there somewhere.”  If they are to be invested in the preservation of their future, they must grasp that nature is them – it is their world, their lawn, their garden, their park, their food, their soulds.  And they must get to know it in concrete, direct and real ways – both knowing about it and knowing it with hands and mouth and nose and body.”

For most of us, particularly those who don’t live as I do in rural settings, getting our kids out into our gardens may be one of the most urgent projects we can do.  Gene Logsdon wrote about gardening in _The Contrary Farmer_ that the garden is the “proving ground” for the farm.  He meant that gardeners try out many techniques that can be adapted to farm scale.  But it is also the proving ground for the new generation of farmers – if we are to scale up from 2% of the population involved in food production to the 10 or 20 or 30 percent we will need in the future, those farmers will come first from the garden.  Maybe even your garden.  And if we are to produce a world full of people concerned with a sustainable ecology, they will come from the garden ecology. 

I want my children to live in the garden – and that means welcoming them into it, making it accessible to them, setting them to work in it, helping them play there beside us while we dig or hoe.  I want them to dream in the garden, and of the garden, so even though it is twice as much work to plant with Asher’s help, we want him to help plant.  Last year when he was two, it was his job to take care of all the “baby” earthworms we uncovered – he would cover them up with a little bit of soil very carefully when the dirt turned them up. 

A child accessible garden starts at the dreaming stage, in winter.  Some books I really like about making children’s gardens and children’s playspaces are these:

_Great Gardens for Kids_ by Chris Matthews – A beautiful book with tons of great ideas for incorporating kids activities into the garden.  My older boys were immediately taken by the idea of a carnivorous bog garden, a daffodil maze, and the catmint cat basket. 

Sharon Lovejoy’s two books _Roots, Shoots, Buckets and Boots_ and _Sunflower Houses_ are terrific, filled with kid friendly ideas for gardening.  My kids loved the year we made a Pizza patch – a circular garden in the shape of a pie, with pizza topping plantings (including calendulas and marigolds for “cheese” along with the tomatoes, basil, eggplant and peppers).  My friend Alexandra has made a playhouse for her children out of sunflowers with morning glories trained across for the roof.  And this year, we’re planning a butterfly flower garden in the shape of a butterfly.

What about books for kids about gardens?  This time of year, storytime often features garden stories.  Here are some of our favorites:

_Weslandia_ by Paul Fleischman.  Wesley doesn’t fit into his mainstream culture, but he does pay attention at school and one summer, he decides that his summer project will be “to grow his own staple food crop – and found his own civilization.”  And believe it or not, he does – the strange weeds that show up in his garden plot turn out to have a myriad of uses.  This is just a flat out great book!

_A Kid’s Herb Book: For Children of All Ages_ by Lesley Tierra is one of my own favorite herb books, and a big hit with my kids.  While I admit, the stories are a little boring (12 variations on “finding the magic herb”), the book is generally very good.

_Eddie’s Garden and How to Make Things Grow_ by Sarah Garland is cute – my kids think the little sister who eats worms is hysterical.  Very good garden book.

_How Groundhog’s Garden Grew_ by Lynne Cherry is perhaps my single favorite children’s gardening book – lovely, lovely illustrations, and a great book.  Every kid could use this!

_A Gardener’s Alphabet_ by Mary Azarian – wonderful woodcut illustrations covering real things like “prune” and “arbor.”

_Pumpkin Circle: The Story of a Garden_ by George Levenson.  Lovely, rhyming slightly mysterious introduction to the lifecycle of a pumpkin, that uber-kid plant. 

This is just a small selection of children’s garden books – there are many others and on my long to-do list is a full list of them. 

Ok, onto strategies for bringing kids into the garden.

 1. Start ‘em early.  I was running a CSA when the kids were babies, so we *had* to spend time out there – a lot of it.  They could play on the grass or in the playpen or in the dirt, but they had to get used to being out in the garden with us.  Just like you have to go to work, or do the dishes, the garden should be treated as fun, but essential from as early as possible.

 2. Make it kid friendly – this can be a pile of dirt and a spoon, or it can be elaborate play structures for their entertainment.  But think about how to make it friendly – can you draw hopscotch or foursquare on the sidewalk next to your garden beds?  Can you give them a garden of their own, or a section of yours?  What about a little fountain to give them water to play in?

3. Get them involved from the beginning – my kids love to look at seed catalogs with me, and have strong opinions about what flowers and herbs we should be growing.  We plan kid projects – we’ve done our pizza garden, an alphabet garden (a plant for every letter) and a three sisters garden, as well as other projects.

4. Assign garden chores.  Yes, I know some people will say “I came to hate the garden because my Mom made me hoe.”  So what?  I hated doing dishes when my Mom made me do them, but since they need doing, I went on to do dishes without whining.  Chores are a fact of life, and if you are getting your family’s food from the garden, they should be helping.  Little kids will love helping, while bigger kids may whine, they can still do their share.  Treating the garden as optional trivializes it.

5. Be out there together.  Make your garden space, however big or small, a place you live in.  That way, when the hummingbird comes to the feeder for the first time, or you see the first monarch, when the cherry tomatoes come ripe or the melons are ready for thumping, well, you’ll be together. 

6. Let them eat – encourage your kids to scavenge, plant lots of snackable things – this is what everbearing and alpine strawberries and cherry tomatoes are for.  But don’t underestimate your kids – when they are in the garden, they’ll try things they’d never touch on a plate.  So plant greens, edible flowers, anything and everything.  And when the peas all get devoured by the kids shrug and accept that it is a good thing.

Sharon

• garden design , parenting
• Comments(23)

Sharon February 5th, 2009

Wanna see a sketch of my place? Or part of it, anyway? http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/2009/02/creating-base-plan.html

 This is the courtyard of our property that I’ve been turning into a combination food forest and potted garden – Aaron made a sketch of it as an example of how to draw a useful base plan for your own garden.  One of my goals for this class is to really optimize our use of the space, which has several advantages:

1. It is much warmer than the rest of the property – it is a south facing space sheltered on three sides. In addition, the walkway and the cement slab porch soak up heat pretty nicely. 

2. It has the best soil on the property – it was trucked in for my husband’s grandparents garden, something I’ve written about here in this essay (“Sure as G-d Made Little Green Apricots”).  Not sure where they got it, but that stuff kicks ass compared to the heavier, wetter soil that came with the house.

3. It is right outside the kitchen door – and thus is is zone 1 in permaculture terms – the perfect space to put the things we need most.  There are glass doors (which I forgot to indicate to Aaron, thus screwing up his design) off the kitchen that go straight onto the slab porch.

 Here’s what I do with it so far, but I’ll gladly take suggestions.  Most of the large beds inside the enclosure now have tender fruit trees – two apricots, two dwarf peaches and two quinces.  Along with a bunch of Hansen’s Bush Cherries, a couple of hazels and a grapevine, (oh, and a spirea I can’t get out from the narrow space between the slab and the walkway, so its staying – very pretty) that pretty much takes up all the space I’ve got for larger plants.  But other than a lot of comfrey (underplanting the trees) , some bulbs and galliardas for pretty and pennyroyal run rampant (along with some ivy), my low plantings are more limited than they should be.

I run containers along the walkway and cover much of the slab with them.  The slab is also where indoor flats move in and out in springtime and where potted plants are put out in fall and then back in at night as the temps fluctuate.  Oh, and there’s a grill and a picnic table out there.

The two beds on the side are herb beds, made with cement blocks, one for herb teas and the other for culinary herbs.  I really love the cement block beds, because they’ll never rot (unlike the wooden ones we’ve got) and the little holes are great for planting pretty small plants – dianthus, johnny jump up, curly parsley, etc….

My goals are to organize the space better, especially the slab, which gets cluttered with my pots, to underplant more useful things (wild ginger, sweet woodruff and ramps underneath the shady apricots, alpine strawberries along the edges, and….?  And to do more vertical stuff – besides my grapevine I want another maypop and to make the cinnamon vine I have stop crawling over the slab .

In the long term, I’ve thought about insulating the slab and putting a greenhouse on it – but so far no money for that.

 Suggestions? Ideas?  What are you doing with your smaller spaces?

 Sharon

• garden , garden design
• Comments(2)

Sharon February 5th, 2009

I’m an avid container gardener.  This may seem weird, given that I have literally acres of dirt on my farm, and yet, there are simply things that do better in containers for me than they do in the ground.  Containers provide a way of dealing with a host of garden problems, and, IMHO, are useful to all gardeners, whether you’ve got a balcony and stone stoop or a vast farm. 

Among the reasons I use containers:

1. To mimic soil conditions I don’t have – for example, I have a tough time growing any long carrots in my heavy soil – so I grow my carrots in containers which have just the perfect carrot soil.  This would also work for those who don’t have acidic enough soil to grow blueberries or who need other specific conditions.

2.  To heat up my plants more.  Where I live, in upstate NY in the hills, overnight temperatures often fall into the 50s (and sometimes 40s) in the summer. Peppers, eggplant and melons just plain don’t like cool nights.  Since containers heat up more in general, I find that I get better production from these plants.  The heat stress also gives me hotter peppers.  For those who don’t need more heat may not find this useful – at least in the summer.  On the other hand, a sunny, warm spot might be just what you need to overwinter an especially tender plant.

3. Beause I can put plants in places I couldn’t.  That means I can have morning glories twining up my mailbox (surrounded on three sides by concrete) and can pretty up my water barrels with snapdragons.  You can take advantage of your best sun exposure, even if there’s no dirt there, or make a place that would be unproductive fertile.  I also use containers to bring plants to my kids – putting cherry tomatoes and lambs ears where they play so they can nibble or pet.  And scent – well that’s still another reason – really fragrant plants deserve to be where we’re most likely to get the benefit from them.  And think about what could be done with all those city rooftops using containers?

4. To extend my season.  In pots on a glassed in porch, parsley, arugula, winter lettuce, scallions and bok choy will begin producing in March.  Nasturtiums seeded now on a sunny windowsill will start blooming by May, feeding both my need for color and my desire for peppery salads.  On the other end, the potted peppers, cherry tomatoes and eggplants I bring in will produce into December.  Sage, thyme, basil and mint will last all winter.  For those in hot climates, greens can be moved from warm spots to shadier and cooler ones, making the salad season longer.

5. To allow me to plant tender plants.  I have figs, bay and citrus trees and am mulling over a dwarf banana.  Lemon Verbena, scented geraniums, aloe, gotu kola, bacopa, zaatar, and Vietnamese coriander fill my windowsills.  And right now, my albutilon and begonias are flowering, brightening winter gloriously.   I’ve promised the boys a garden of carnivorous plants to be overwintered indoors as well.

I also find container gardening psychologically so *manageable* – that is, when the garden is full of weeds and merely facing it seems overwhelming, well, there’s no reason you can’t attend to one pot.  Deadheading one pot of flowers or planting herbs in a pot is a garden chore most of us can face, even on the hottest day.

Now what kills a lot of container gardening attempts is the problem of water – and on hot days, a plant might well need to be watered several times.  The best solution to this is the self-watering container, also known as an “earthbox.”  You can buy them or make them.  The definitive book on the subject is Ed Smith’s _Incredible Vegetables From Self-Watering Containers_.  It is worth looking at, because there are some specific strategies to be used.

Self-watering containers are essentially a pot within a reservoir pot, arranged so that nothing sits in water.  They can be made or purchased, but since my friend Pat Meadows has written a very clear and useful post on the subject here: http://entire-of-itself.blogspot.com/2008/02/growing-vegetables-in-self-watering.html I won’t duplicate the information.  The pots are not difficult to make at all, and you can play with the techniques a little.

Pat is one of the most knowledgeable people out there on the subject of container gardening – she used to sell seeds for container gardens, and she now moderates the Edible Container Gardening list, which has almost 2000 people on it.  If you are interested in subscribing, you can do so by sending an email to:ediblecontainergardens-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.  The group is an amazing resource.

If you live in a cooler place, or are prepared to water often, regular containers are great – in fact, some things do better in regular containers than the SWCs - herbs like thyme and oregano, nasturtiums and hot peppers (Smith says hot peppers do fine, but he doesn’t actually seem to like to eat them – since water stress makes peppers hotter, if you are an actual chile head, you won’t want to use SWCs).  You can use anything that hasn’t been used for something toxic as a container – we grow plants in old boots, in cooking pots with holes – after a while, everything is a potential garden pot.   

Here are some recipes for potting mixes: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/207498/homemade_potting_mix_recipes.html?cat=32.  If you buy peat, make sure it is harvested from an area that is not under ecological stress.  I don’t recommend vermiculite at all – breathing it in isn’t good for you.

For fertility, if you are using regular containers, you should remember that you’ll be washing out a lot more fertility than you would be with other plants, and fertilize often.  My own personal fertility plan is to add plenty of worm compost, greensand and a good organic fertilizer mix (make your own or purchase – more on fertilizers later in the class), and to fertilize alternately with compost tea, and human urine diluted 1/10.  To be safe, I don’t use urine within a week of harvest – although there’s very little risk unless you have leptospriosis (at which point you’ve got other problems: see my post “Free Nitrogen – Comes With Handy Dispenser!).

What can you grow in containers?  Almost anything, if you have a big enough container, up to and including small trees.  Realistically, smaller varieties are generally easier to grow.  I’m a big fan of “Red Robin” tomatoes, “Fish” hot peppers and “Little Fingers” Eggplant in containers, but really you’d be stunned at what you can grow in a pot.  I love to mix herbs and flowers and vegetables together – there is nothing like “bright lights” chard mixed with parsley and dianthus, or an artichoke underplanted with purple vining petunias spilling over the sides.  The art of edible container gardening makes it a delight.

I’d encourage everyone to expand their growing space with containers whenever possible.  It is easy to think that pots can only grow a little – but that little bit adds up.

 Sharon

• garden , garden design
• Comments(17)