Thursday, October 6, 2011

Gardening In Unusual Spaces

So you live in a tiny space and are dreaming of one day being able to do some  significant food gardening.
But  right now it is nothing more than a dream. The only thing outside your front door is concrete.
 Not much opportunity there.
After all, growing food requires soil. . . . right?
Wrong.
Soil is great and my first choice for growing food, but it is certainly not the only option.
Pots are an excellent choice as well.
If you want to go organic when growing your food in a pot and avoid chemical fertilizers, you can add a good helping of compost and composted manure to your potting mix and still have great results.
 Perhaps you are thinking that a few tomatoes or an herb pot can barely be called significant food gardening.
Which is true, although nothing to sneeze at when it comes to to opportunity to eat a little delicious home grown food.
But who said you can only grow a small pot or two???
If all you have is a driveway and you use the largest pots you can find, you really can grow a significant amount of food!
Here's what I grew in my drive way garden this year. . .






I would call that a significant amount of food! 
This is our fall harvest. On top of this we have also been eating tomatoes and peppers of the vine for a least a month now.
The real trick to growing  food in pots is to get the largest pots you have room for. This gives the plants lots of room for root growth and allows you to go much longer between watering for most of the growing season.
If I had been more consistent in my watering late in the season when the plants had gotten very large and required more water I would have had an even better harvest!
Live and learn. . . (I have learned that next year I will be putting in drip irrigation rather than counting on myself to water when I need to. Sometimes I get distracted. . .)
Gardening in pots is fun and best of all, they never need weeding!
So next season, why not give it a try?

1 comments:

Tamara Jansen said...

Wow! You are some amazing gardener! Do you give classes??

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