Your Small Kitchen Garden is for people who grow--or who want to grow--their own food, though in limited space. We explore how to grow vegetables and fruit with emphasis on expending little effort and energy. Please come share with us in our lazy garden.
Yes, some of the broccoli has gotten away from me. I’ve planted the same variety for two years, and in both years it has produced tiny heads. I kind of loose interest in it, though we do eat most of the side shoots. This winter I’ll be shopping around for a breed of broccoli that makes giant heads… the tiny yields I’ve had lately aren’t worth the garden space.
It’s Garden Bloggers Bloom Day, an event that happens on the 15th of each month. Founded by Carol over at May Dreams Gardens, Bloom Day beckons garden bloggers the world over to post photographs of what’s abloom in their gardens. Most of these posts have pictures of beautiful flowers in gorgeous ornamental gardens. Alas, my small kitchen garden isn’t about pretty.
Still, I love the blossoms nearly as much as I love the vegetables… and seeing them heightens my anticipation for the harvest that’s likely to follow. Things are doing extremely well this season. Early heat followed by drought has finally relented to several days of rain and more typical summer temperatures.
Here are the flowers I photographed this afternoon in my small kitchen garden:
I haven’t planted dill this year, but there are many dill weed blossoms in my small kitchen garden. The flowers attract all kinds of insects. If I let the dill go to seed as it did last year, I imagine the planting bed will be a veritable lawn of dill sprouts in the spring.
The oregano jungle has rebounded from some autumn and spring culling. The flowers are delicate and they provide beautiful contrast for nearly half the growing season. Still, I need to be more aggressive culling this fall; the oregano patch increases about a third in size in a season.
Onion blossoms make me happy. The globe of tiny flowers emerges in late spring and lingers for weeks. I cut a bouquet of onion flowers for the dining room table, and they’ve filled the room with a delicious onion aroma for nearly a month. I don’t encourage you to harvest your onion flowers; I had missed a few bulbs last fall, and what sprouted this spring needed to go to make way for the 2010 crops.
We’ve eaten bell and poblano peppers from the small kitchen garden this year, and there are dozens of banana peppers ready to harvest. Happily, there are many pepper blossoms which portend a massive harvest. I expect I’ll pickle a lot of peppers… and probably give away a whole bunch of them.
This sad specimen is an early cucumber blossom on a plant growing in a container. This is the first time I’ve grown cucumbers, so I’ll probably do some research to learn about what bugs eat cucumber blossoms… I haven’t seen this kind of abuse on my winter squash blossoms in past seasons.
The potato blossoms here stand above the background of the cardboard tube in which the plants are growing. I wrote about this project in a post titled Plant Potato Towers in your Small Kitchen Garden. In two of three planters, the potato plants have grown up through an accumulated 3 feet or more of soil. I’ve stopped adding soil, and the plants have gone on to grow well above the containers and produce flowers. One of my neighbors has asked me to invite him when I tip the containers over and dig out the potatoes. He’s as curious as I am to see how things come out.
Oh, the tomato blossoms abound! This has been the season of the great seed-starting debacle: I planted a whole bunch of seeds indoors, and they didn’t sprout. So, I planted again as many. This second batch sprouted about when the first batch sprouted; I ended up with double the seedlings I’d intended. After giving away many tomato seedlings, I crammed 84 plants into my small kitchen garden where I have traditionally planted 24.
While photographing flowers today, I found the very first barely pink tomato of the season! This may be the largest chili-pepper-shaped paste tomato I’ve harvested, and many more on the plants are just as big. Why did I pick it when it’s so under ripe? I explained last season in a post titled The Vine-Ripened Tomato Lie. This baby will finish ripening on my dining room table.
While I wait for frosty cold nights to end in the spring, weeds grow wild in my small kitchen garden… but alongside those weeds: volunteer herbs! Here, a cilantro plant that must have rooted in the fall keeps pace with a thistle plant whose tap root probably reaches nine or more inches into the soil.
As the owner of a small kitchen garden, I have a lot of enthusiasm for volunteers. The volunteers I’m talking about are the ones that sprout in my planting beds in the footprint of last year’s plants: their parents.
Of the plants I grow, the most successful at reproduction are cilantro and dill. Both toss hundreds—maybe even thousands of seeds onto the soil from about mid-summer until early winter… and dozens of those seeds manage to take root in the spring before I get into the garden. Tomatoes also try to procreate, and succeed occasionally when a fruit falls from a plant and I leave it to rot on the mulch. I’ve even had the occasional squash plant emerge from seeds I can only imagine some rodent or bird dropped during a trip from my compost heap.
Hindrance to Planting my Small Kitchen Garden
As much as I love the volunteers (they provide fresh herbs weeks before I’d harvest any from seeds I plant intentionally), they interfere with my gardening. I try to work around them, but invariably I have to excavate huge patches of them to make way for other produce I wish to plant.
Sometimes I transplant some volunteer herb plants, but mostly I try to harvest them before I till. Dehydrated homegrown herbs have so much more fragrance and flavor than commercially-packed herbs. It’s astonishing how much like fresh herbs they smell and taste.
The day I excavated furrows for my tomato plants, I needed to weed out hundreds of volunteer dill plants and dozens of volunteer cilantro plants. Here’s a three-minute video I recorded in the garden as I harvested herbs:
The grower of this mint has prevented potential disaster by restricting the plant to life in a flower pot. Let mint loose in your small kitchen garden, and you may run out of space for vegetables.
Mint is a fascinating plant with a wonderful flavor… but be very cautious about planting it in your small kitchen garden. I’m inspired to share this with you because of a tweet I read from @batesnursery some weeks ago:
Plant mint between cabbages for natural protection from caterpillars and other pests and eventually everything else, except mint
The tweet made me laugh, and it brought to mind a garden I visited last summer. This was a community kitchen garden managed by several people with a variety of gardening sensibilities. One of the gardeners insisted that the garden needed to have mint. They planted mint in one corner.
A Small Kitchen Garden Mint Debacle
By the time I saw this garden, the mint had extended itself from the garden’s corner across the entire length off the garden. There were mint sprouts at various intervals along a line trending North, and other pockets of mint sprouts at apparently random places throughout. The gardeners told me they had already pulled the mint!
So, after a season of growth, and another of mortal combat, the mint continued its campaign to capture all the cultivated space… and the surrounding meadow.
This small, shared kitchen garden is under siege from a little mint plant that overtook the planting bed in the previous season, suffered severe damage at the hands of frustrated gardeners, and has re-emerged to wreak further havoc (that mass in the bottom-left corner of the photo is mint).
Contain Mint While it’s Young
My recommendation concerning mint is simple: don’t plant it in your garden beds. If you must, isolate your mint plants by burying a container and planting within the container. Then, don’t let the mint plants escape from the container! Most prudent of all is to plant mint in containers above ground and somewhat separate from your vegetable beds.
If you love mint, and you recognize its potential to provide top-notch ground cover, by all means put it to work. It’s a gorgeous plant with square stems, regal textures, and delightful aromas. But understand its character, and be prepared. I’ve seen many a kitchen gardener despair at the aggressive assault of advancing mint plants.
Subscribe to Your Small Kitchen Garden Vlog
Your Small Kitchen Garden blog has introduced a video blog titled Visit with the Gardener, in which I share snippets of what’s going on in my garden and/or kitchen. I try to keep the videos under two minutes and provide either useful tips and techniques – or encouragement – for you to try new things in your kitchen gardens.
Please have a look, and jump over to Youtube to subscribe to my channel. Here’s the link to my channel: Your Small Kitchen Garden Vlog. And here’s an example of a recent post on the vlog. Please enjoy:
My peppers are coming on strong this season, but these are tomatoes. I’m so looking forward to harvesting these. They grow very large and contain very little gel; they are nearly all-meat. I expect they’ll produce an enormous amount of sauce compared to what I’d get from a comparable volume of beefsteak tomatoes. The weight of fourteen plants holding, perhaps, 15 tomatoes apiece was pulling the trellis down, but some cross-bracing seems to have relieved the pressure.
There’s a lot going on in my small kitchen garden, and I’d like to share all of it with whomever might be interested. Alas, I’ve traveled quite a bit in the past three weeks, and I’ve been unable to complete the last of my planned plantings. This is awkward because I’m confident that the seasons aren’t going to wait around for me to catch up: what might have grown to maturity had I planted it in early July will probably hit a wall being planted now all of three weeks later.
Still, today I played catch up. Here’s a list of projects I completed today, though I wish I had finished them in June:
1. Shored up the tomato trellises. Technically, I wouldn’t have known in June where to add shoring; the trellises only started to sag last week. Turns out the tomato stakes I converted into tomato trellises aren’t happy holding the weight of 14 heavily-fruited plants. I expected some trouble when I built the trellises; this morning I dealt with it.
2. Planted basil in another planter and in another patch of garden. I really wish I’d done this in June. I’ve had just enough early tomatoes ripen that I’ve prepared my very favorite of all salads Outrageously Good Tomato Salad from a Small Kitchen Garden. However, none of the basil I planted outdoors this year is mature enough to harvest. So, I’ve nearly depleted the basil plant that grew on my basement windowsill over the winter. I’ll need basil in the next few days, and I’d hate to have to buy it at a grocery store.
I first wrote about how I built supports for my over-crowded tomatoes in a post titled Tomato Supports in you Small Kitchen Garden. This morning I added a cross-piece that ties together three tellises. The tops of the trellises are nearly 7 feet high, and plants are already just six inches shy of them. These plants could grow eleven or twelve feet long before a killing frost knocks them out.
When cilantro plants get tall and start to flower, they put out a lot of very thin leaves. These tend to be woodier than earlier leaves and they aren’t as flavorful. Better at this point to let the plants make coriander and get some new ones started so they’re putting out large, flat, fragrant leaves when the tomatoes are ripe and ready to go into salsa.
Nearly all my peppers are in planters this season. The plants on the deck’s hand rail have produced a lot of small peppers (the planters are too small for the plants). Many of the peppers are turning red, providing striking bouquets all along the railing.
3. Planted more cilantro in the garden. I’ve already benefited from two crops of cilantro. However, the second crop is getting very flowery which means it won’t be so tender and fragrant in the next few weeks. As the beefsteak tomatoes start ripening, I want a lot of wide, young cilantro leaves on-hand because I’m planning to can salsa this year.
4. Planted another soda bottle with carrots. I’ll post an update of my soda bottle carrot planter within the week. Today I started nine carrot seeds in a 3-liter soda bottle. I’m guardedly enthusiastic about soda bottle carrot planters… but more on this in an upcoming post.
5. Set up a planting box to capture the stolons of my strawberry plants. Actually, my strawberries have put out so many stolons this year that I can’t accommodate all of them. I’ve tried to encourage stolons only from the plants that produced large, attractive berries… but I don’t have enough planters—nor room for the ones I have—to handle all the new growth.
6. Planted sweet potatoes using my home-grown alternative to garbage can potatoes. This is extremely experimental for two reasons. 1: I’m not sure whether sweet potatoes will like the garbage can method that potatoes like so well. 2: I “invented” an alternative to the garbage can that adds a bit of risk to the health of the plants. I’ll provide more details in an upcoming post.
I had to stop gardening when my in-laws and family returned from the county fair; they settled into our screened-in porch where I’ve stashed containers, soil, seeds, and other gardening stuff. I’ve two projects I didn’t complete. 1: Planting my last three tomato plants in a reusable shopping bag. 2: Planting a few beans in milk jug planters.
I hope to finish up tomorrow.
My strawberry plants’ stolons have stolons which, in turn, have stolons. The planters sit on the deck, so the strawberries are getting frustrated in their attempts to clone themselves. I’ve directed stolons into two new planters this year, and will continue to capture these babies until I develop a dedicated strawberry bed in my yard.
In the category of Flower closest to my kitchen: A bell pepper plant is just starting to set fruit. I have great hopes as there are already dozens of banana peppers and a few jalapeno peppers ripening just a few feet away.
Flowers are not the point of a small kitchen garden. However, without flowers, there are very few food products a kitchen garden can produce. So, though I often joke that I’m too lazy to plant something that I won’t eventually eat, I am very fond of flowers.
I’m also very fond of the on-line gardening community. While many participants in that community discuss their food-growing activities, it seems a majority prefer the time they spend with their flower and ornamental gardens. From the photos on their blogs, I know I’d enjoy spending time in their gardens as well… but I have no flower- or ornamental-garden to offer in kind.
And then there’s Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day started by Carol over at May Dreams Gardens: on the 15th of each month, participating garden bloggers post entries about what’s abloom in their gardens. This month, I’m joining the gang. But my post isn’t about nasturtiums, pansies, cone flowers, daisies, black-eyed susans, and clematis. You won’t find such things in my garden (sure, you’ll find them in my wife’s garden, but she doesn’t blog). Still, my small kitchen garden is blooming its head off, and I’m psyched because nearly every blossom means another goody to eat growing in my yard.
In the category of Tallest herb in my small kitchen garden: Dill weed volunteers grow where seed fell from last year’s plants. This variety of dill grows about five feet tall.
In the category of Don’t get me started: If I left all the volunteer cilantro plants to grow as they please in my small kitchen garden, I’d never again have to plant the herb. However, the volunteers rarely start where I’d like them to. Shortly after they flower, the plants produce coriander: the round seeds that either plant themselves in the garden or season a variety of Asian and South American foods.
Yes, more cilantro flowers. I wanted to point out that flowers aren’t the be-all and end-all of pretty in a small kitchen garden. Several varieties of variegated lettuce are still growing where I planted them, and they provide an attractive background for this volunteer coriander factory.
In the category of Invasive, noxious herb: About five years ago, I planted a tiny oregano plant from one of those 1.5-inch-cubed nursery pots. There is now a five-foot diameter circle of densely-packed oregano shoots, and they have just started to flower. No doubt, this fall I’ll be excavating oregano roots to decrease the plant’s footprint by at least half.
In the category of Winningest weed: It’s tiny. It likes my small kitchen garden planting bed. It’s gorgeous. I had to kneel with one elbow on the ground to get close enough for the photo.
In the category of Most fun for the money: In my first year growing climbing beans, I have become enamored. The flowers look a lot like all other bean flowers I’ve grown. However, I’ve had a lot of fun tying up strings and training the bean vines to use them. The tallest climber is about to pass the end of its string and become entwined with the kids’ play set (my youngest child is 13 years old, and the play set sees play about once a year).
In the category of Another tomato blossom photo: Yes, I’ve photographed a lot of tomato blossoms over the years. This photo is a little different as it vaguely captures the components of the tomato support system I erected this year in place of tomato stakes.
In the category of It’s cool to be different: I love the round cluster of flowers that emerges at the end of a long onion stalk. Ideally, your onions don’t flower; flowering generally results in a smaller onion bulb with a short shelf life. However, crazy weather can cause flowering, and growing onions from sets can also lead to flowers. No matter. My onions are plump and I’ll use them quickly once the stalks flop to the ground. My onion flowers look grand.
In the category of: Who’s happy on Garden Blogers’ Bloom Day? And: who doesn’t have clover flowers in their yards and gardens?
In one twenty-minute thunderstorm, all the planters and seedling holders I had outdoors filled with water. Some potted seedlings floated and tipped sideways. Had I not spent ten minutes draining things, roots might have drowned. Without drainage holes, your container garden poses unecessary challenges.
When I’m not in my small kitchen garden, I spend a significant amount of time browsing the Internet to see what other people are saying about gardening. A few weeks ago, I read an article about container gardening that made my jaw drop. The author poo-pooed putting drainage holes in your containers. I don’t recall his exact words, but this represents the gist:
It seems most people tell you to put drainage holes in the bottoms of your planters. You don’t have to. Go ahead and try planting without drainage holes and you’ll see what I mean.
I hope this author thought that everyone growing plants in containers does so indoors. Then his observation is valid: you really don’t need drainage holes for containers that you maintain indoors. You can control how much water you give your plants, and add more only when the soil is dry; with little effort, you can master watering whether your pots include drainage holes or they retain every drop of water you pour into them.
17 days ago, I cut the top off a soda bottle, punched drainage holes in the bottom, added soil, and planted 11 carrot seeds. Things are coming along fine. While carrots will withstand a light frost, I’ve kept my planter indoors; we’ve had four unseasonably cold nights this May with another on the way. I’ll move the planter outdoors tomorrow.
Container Gardening Outdoors
If you plant in containers outdoors, make sure there are drainage holes in the containers. This is imperative. A single rainstorm can dump many inches of water on every surface. A planter without drainage can capture all that water, and end up overflowing. Depending on what and how you’ve planted, this can be very bad for your plants.
For example, a recently-repotted plant in light soil could float to the surface of the pot and then fall out. A heavy rain can wash much of the soil out of a pot. Perhaps worse: once saturated by a heavy rain, a pot without drainage will hold water that can drown a plant’s roots, encourage the growth of algae and mold, or provide an inviting environment for bacteria that will cause your plant to rot.
Over the weekend, we had a twenty minute downpour that filled some of my planting containers with three inches of water. It was an awesome powerful rain. Many of my potted seedlings sat in that rain. They are still in peat pots, inside of food-storage containers intended to protect my ping-pong table when the seedlings were inside under lights. After the rain, I spent ten minutes draining water from the containers and topping several up with soil (much soil had floated away on the rainwater).
If your small kitchen garden is outdoors in containers, make sure the containers have drainage holes, or heavy rains could destroy your produce.
Here are other articles about container gardening that you might find useful:
Which Plants are Best for a Container Garden? – by Sarah Duke. Container gardening is a very easy way to get fresh produce with very little effort. A wide variety of vegetables, herbs and fruit can be grown in pots. Herbs are the most popular, followed by vegetables. …
re: grow your own food – you also might think about container gardening. my mom doesn’t want to be bothered with a whole garden and grows just a few tomato plants in pots on the carport. it works great. copy and paste the following url for a fact sheet on …
I’m fortunate to have a heap of mature compost accumulated over 13 years from lawn clippings, leaves, weeds, and kitchen scraps.
Preparing to plant a small kitchen garden in a classic raised bed should be very easy to do. Actually, whether raised or in-ground, the issue is more whether you walk in the planting bed. If you don’t walk in the planting bed, you don’t compact the soil (much) so you don’t need to dig deep and turn the soil as you do in a traditional in-ground planting bed.
I “manage” compost in a heap. I say “manage” because there are only two procedures I follow: 1) Add organic matter as my yard, garden, and kitchen produce it. 2) Occasionally, toss a bit of soil from the garden onto the heap (this often comes as clumps of soil attached to roots of weeds I remove from the garden). My compost might take a year or longer to break down, but I’m not in a hurry. The liability of a compost heap is that it nurtures weeds; my heap grows mostly dandelions, thistle, and elephant grass. So, when I harvest compost, I pick through it looking for roots. On the left in this photo is a section of root from elephant grass; left in the soil, it’ll send up a gorgeous stand of grass leaves… and it’ll spread quickly underground. I can’t identify the root on the right, but it looks hearty; were I to plant it in my garden, I’m sure it would grow into something annoying.
Spread three inches of compost or manure evenly over the entire surface of the raised bed.
Ideally, autumn is when you start preparing raised beds for planting, but if you’re just getting started in the spring, things should work out just fine. Here are steps you can take to prepare your soil for planting if your beds are small enough that you never walk in them:
1. Excavate all weeds from the planting bed. A soil knife is ideal for this as you shouldn’t need to pry out large, cohesive blocks of compacted soil to get at the tap roots of weeds.
2. Cover the bed with a layer of organic matter. Ideally, use mature compost. Alternatively, use manure or mushroom soil. If you were preparing your raised planting bed at the end of your growing season, I’d encourage you to spread six inches of manure over the entire bed; rain and snow will leech nutrients into the soil and the organic material will break down a bit before spring.
However, if you didn’t add material in the fall, spread only about three inches of organic stuff on your raised bed in the spring. For the most part, you’ll leave this material in place; it will serve as mulch, and will feed a rich bath of nutrients to your vegetables’ roots during rainstorms and watering.
Measure along the retaining walls of your raised bed and attach twine (or yarn) to delineate planting zones. A one-foot by three-foot space might hold a “hedge” of lettuce, a small forest of spinach, or a jungle of pea vines… what to plant, and how much space to reserve depends on your tastes and your sensibilities. Upcoming posts will make specific suggestions about planting in raised beds.
If you need tools heftier than a hand trowel or a soil knife to work the soil in your raised beds, it may be because there’s too much clay in the soil. Add sand and humus and mix it in well to reduce the soil’s tendency to clump. If you’re installing raised beds this spring, fill them with soil that is at least 40% sand. Add humus every season.
3. Stretch twine to mark planting zones in your raised vegetable bed. You can set nails or staples in the tops of the raised bed retaining walls, or sink stakes in the soil as you would in an in-ground bed.
In a narrow bed, rather than restrict planting to rows, plant in zones. For example, in a 4’ X 4’ bed, a zone might start at one retaining wall and stretch for one foot into the bed. You could distribute lettuce plants evenly within this one-foot-by-four-foot zone. Or, divide the bed into 2’ squares, planting a particular type of vegetable in each square.
4. When you’re ready to plant, your technique will differ depending on whether you’re planting seedlings or seeds. An upcoming post will discuss how to plant in a narrow bed that’s covered with compost or manure.
Each week I take about seven gallon milk jugs to the recycling center. This year, a dozen or so will become planters instead. A few have been on my ping pong table for two weeks, and young pepper plants have just started to emerge. The planters won’t win a Garden Beautiful award, but the peppers will be sweeter for the money I’ve saved.
I hate to spend money on my small kitchen garden. Fundamentally, growing food involves burying seeds in soil and beating weeds, insects, and other pests out of the way until produce is ready to harvest. Any expense beyond the cost of seeds seems excessive.
Those who lack space for a traditional garden may feel doomed to spend money on containers, potting soil, and soil additives, and these can inflate the costs of growing produce. My last post, Containers for Your Small Kitchen Garden, explored types of containers available commercially to hold a garden on your patio, deck, porch, windowsill, or small yard. Those ranged in price from under a dollar up to $1,500. This post is about squeezing the most planter you can out of your gardening budget.
Don’t Shop the Garden Department
I did a survey of a local department store’s garden department. They have a wonderful selection of reasonably-priced planters. The price tag on a window box I liked asked for $9. Prices on deck boxes—square 5-gallon planters suitable for large vegetable plants such as tomatoes and squash—started at about $15.
I expect to set peppers in several milk jugs dressed up like this one. They hang perfectly between balusters so I can run them the length of the handrail. Because they hang below the rail, on a horizontal handrail, I can also install rail planters.
In other departments of the store, I found some lower-cost alternatives to planters. For example, plastic shoe boxes with covers cost about $1.75 per box. Two of these provide a bit less planting space than that $9 window box—but $9 of shoe boxes will grow way more vegetables than $9 of window box.
In other departments, I found buckets: wash buckets, paint buckets, and utility buckets. These all were less expensive than planters of corresponding sizes.
The point is, you can find dozens of containers whose prices are lower than those of flower pots and planters. But if you go this route, consider:
1. A storage container probably doesn’t have drainage holes in the bottom. Adding drainage holes is important especially if the containers will sit where they can catch rain. (During a particularly heavy rainstorm one year, soil was flowing over the tops of my deck planters which had filled with water. I braved the downpour to stab the planters with a hole punch so water would drain out the bottoms.)
In early May, this three-liter soda bottle will become an upside-down planter. I’ll cut off the bottle’s bottom, hang the bottle top-down, and insert a plant through the bottle’s neck. The resulting planter will be so small that it will require nearly daily watering and quite a bit of plant food to keep a tomato plant happy.
2. A storage container won’t come with—nor offer the option of buying—a fitted catch-saucer or tray. If your containers will sit outdoors where water spills don’t matter, you don’t need saucers under them. However, if you start plants in containers indoors and then move them out, you might wish you had saucers for them.
3. A plastic planter expects to spend much time in sunlight; a storage container or bucket doesn’t. The plastic of a storage container may be brittle to begin with, and could become more brittle with long-term exposure to sunlight. A $9 window box may significantly outlast a $1.75 plastic shoe box.
Spend Even Less
You probably throw out or recycle dozens of planters every year. Some obvious containers come to mind: yogurt, cottage cheese, and sour cream containers all will handle small plants; you can grow many types of herbs in them as long as you harvest often to keep the plants under control.
Finding free containers for larger loads requires a smidge of creativity. This year, I’m experimenting with 2- and 3-liter soft drink bottles, and one-gallon plastic milk jugs. I’m not the first to do this; links at the end of this post lead to other web sites with information about using milk jugs and soft drink bottles as planters.
To use these effectively, you need to alter them. Most simply, cut the tapered neck off a two-liter or three-liter soda bottle, poke holes in the bottom, and you have a deep planter that can handle many types of vegetables and herbs. I’ve done the same with gallon milk jugs, leaving the handles mostly intact.
Inspired by the Topsy Turvy upside down tomato planter, I’ve thought about hanging some plants this year. Sadly, a gallon milk jug is too small for most tomato varieties. Still, I’ve found I can hang milk jug planters easily from the handrail on my deck and leave the rail clear to hold a window-box-style planter. I’m going to grow peppers in these milk jugs.
I’m very excited about reusable grocery bags as planters. For 99 cents, you get a durable, semi-rigid bag with handles. I’ll put a hole in the bottom of the bag, plant a tomato pointing down, and hang the bag on the kids’ play set. With a 5-gallon capacity, the bag is big enough to handle beefsteak varieties of tomato plants.
I also found several schemes for converting a two- or three-liter soda bottle into an upside-down hanging planter, and I’m going to set some plants out this way in early May. The last link at the end of this post is to a web site that describes the scheme I plan to use (once at that site, find the topic IPlanter Modified in the left margin, and click to view the instructions). I believe it was a comment on that web site where I stumbled across a great suggestion for holding down costs on planters: Get a green (reusable) grocery bag.
Where I shop, a reusable bag costs 99 cents. This bag is durable and flexible—and will hold nearly five gallons of stuff. Filled with soil, a reusable shopping bag will hold its shape and handle even the largest annual vegetable plants. But these should also make great upside-down planters: Cut a hole in the bottom of the bag, push the root ball of a young tomato plant through, add soil and water, and hang the bag by its handles. I’ll be trying this in early May, and will document it in Your Small Kitchen Garden blog. If you’re short on space and strapped for cash, pick up some reusable shopping bags and hang them where the sun shines.
Please enjoy these other articles about low-cost planters:
IPlanter Modified I have created a new separate page from my original inverted planter plans as I have devised a method for its construction which I find to be even easier. If you haven’t already…
You can find gorgeous porcelain, stone, concrete, and other planters to dress up your small kitchen garden. These will range in price from tens of dollars to more than $1,000. This porcelain five-gallon planter is available from Amazon.com in Your Small Kitchen Garden store.
When a small kitchen garden must live in containers, people typically start with flower pots and other planters bought at garden stores and department stores. These are usually good choices because most manufacturers make planters that are durable and that provide adequate drainage. What’s more, many designs have garden themes and some fit well into typical settings (for example, you can find deck and rail planters shaped to saddle handrails—the design provides stability so you’re not likely to knock such a planter off the rail).
An Expensive Small Kitchen Garden
The down side of commercially-available planters is their expense. A planter that holds two or three gallons of soil can cost from $15 up to $1,400, depending on how fancy it is. If you’re matching planters to your décor, or trying to make a garden design statement, you can find a large selection of gorgeous containers.
The Topsy Turvy planter grows tomatos upside down. Hang the planter, insert the root ball of a young plant through the bottom of the bag, add soil and water, and you’ll reduce the hassles of growing tomatoes. This is one of the hanging planters available from Amazon.com in Your Small Kitchen Garden store.
More modestly, you can find rugged, attractive plastic or fiberglass planters at department stores and on line. The lowest prices I’ve found on durable five gallon planters were at Odd Lots—some cost less than a dollar per gallon. Other department stores feature similar planters for two to three dollars a gallon. While such inexpensive planters don’t come in a huge variety of designs, they should satisfy most container gardening enthusiasts.
Dirt Cheap Containers
If your small kitchen garden’s entire purpose is to help you economize, consider an unadorned, nursery pot. A gallon-sized nursery pot might cost a dollar and change. A five-gallon nursery pot (considered by many to be the appropriate size for a single tomato plant) could cost close to two dollars. Those are great prices for planters of such sizes, but understand that plants you buy from garden stores often come in nursery pots which most people discard after planting.
I don’t mean to denigrate the nursery pot; you can grow produce in a nursery pot for years if you don’t bang it around or poke holes in it with garden tools. And, if you’re planning to grow six tomato plants on your patio, your savings over grocery store prices will be much greater if you plant in two dollar nursery pots rather than $150 designer ceramic bowls.
Super Gardening Economy
Recently, the nursery pot has faced a contender for least-expensive commercial planter: the plant bag. A plant bag costs about half what you’d pay for a nursery pot of the same capacity.
A plant bag is, in fact, a durable plastic bag. Filled with soil, the bag stays open and upright, and you can plant in it as you would any flower pot. The bags are strong enough that you can lug them around your yard, patio, deck, or whatever… they are supposed to be viable replacements for nursery pots.
Novelty Small Kitchen Garden Planters
It’s probably big enough to grow no more than herbs, but it’s awesome cute. This planter would fit almost anywhere. It’s one of a collection of animal-themed planters available from Amazon.com in Your Small Kitchen Garden store.
Hanging planters, stacking planters, and strawberry pots have been very popular space-savers for the space-challenged gardener. The Topsy Turvy tomato planter became the rage some years ago. You insert the root ball of a growing tomato plant through the bottom of this hanging planter and the plant grows down. The planter is actually a fabric bag or pouch. It’s a terrific space-saver, though it’s very heavy when filled with soil and watered.
Other planting pouches are also available. Typically, these are cylindrical and have slits in the sides through which you insert the roots of growing plants.
Stacking planters and strawberry pots provide ways to plant many plants in a small footprint. Suppose you have room for a single large flower pot? A traditional pot might hold one large plant or two or three small plants. A stack of pots or a strawberry pot might hold six, twelve, or even more plants. Combine such a floor-standing planter high-rise with an overhead hanging planting bag, and you’ll get the greatest advantage from a very modest space.
Please enjoy these other articles about gardening in containers:
Vegetables in Container Gardening – by Sydney J. Calderon. We’re all used to seeing rising prices, but the cost of food seems to have skyrocketed in the last few years. One way to protect yourself against high food prices is to grow your own vegetables. …
Container Gardening » Blog Archive » Tinkering Through the Tulips … – Whether you choose to grow flowers, herbs or vegetables, you can be successful at container gardening. If you follow these tips, you’ll be enjoying all the benefits of a garden in no time, no matter where you live. …
Container Gardening » Blog Archive » Herb Container Gardening in … – container gardening. Mary Hanna asked: Think of how marvelous your home smells when there are wonderful kitchen aromas wafting around while you are cooking with fresh herbs. It could be your Aunt Helens recipe for marinara sauce or a …
From the wisdom of a master gardener: Plant your small kitchen garden with foods you prefer to eat. If your family eats a lot of pasta, then tomatoes are a good choice. I second the thought: expecially when you have limited space, plant what will give you the most joy to eat.
Nearly a month ago, I invited readers of Your Small Kitchen Garden—and people on Twitter—to offer up questions they’d like to ask a Master Gardener. I was on my way to the Pennsylvania Farm Show where I had planned to meet with a Master Gardener and ask those questions. As I reported in several posts: I did meet with a Master Gardener. In fact, I met with several of them.
My activity at the Farm Show was rather hectic, and I failed to coordinate with any of the Master Gardeners until after the Show. However, last week Ginger Pryor, the director of Penn State University’s Master Gardener program, generously took a chunk of a morning to answer the question you folks had asked.Our conversation resulted in more material than should reasonably go into a single blog post, so this is the first installment of Your Small Kitchen Garden’s Answers from a Master Gardener.
Small Kitchen Garden Indoors
Twitter acquaintance @nickfalvo asked about the best way to grow a kitchen garden indoors: What are the best plants? What are the best practices?
Ginger admitted that growing vegetables indoors isn’t her forte (each Master Gardener focuses on aspects of gardening of interest to them), but she acknowledged that growing food indoors is particularly challenging. She suggests that you choose cool-season plants that don’t fruit. She named parsley and chives in this category, and also suggested growing sprouts—pea sprouts, specifically. (Lettuces and spinach are short-season plants that do well in cool weather.)
Among the challenges of a full-bore indoor kitchen garden are
providing adequate light
providing adequate heat
If you’re serious about growing indoors, placing plants in a south-facing window won’t satisfy their need for sunlight; you’ll need to augment with artificial light. You’ll also need to keep the plants warmer than people typically keep their living spaces.
Ginger suggests that you use an indoor kitchen garden primarily to start seeds for later transplant outdoors. To help seeds get started in houses with thermostats set low, put your seed planters on heating pads.
Essential Small Kitchen Garden Tools
I’ve never used a soil knife, but Ginger Pryor, the master gardener who answered your questions, uses no other gardening tool.
Twitter acquaintance @hardknocksmba asked which tools are must-haves for a kitchen gardener. Ginger’s reply: This is a matter of personal taste. She says the only gardening tool she uses is a soil knife; it’s especially useful for breaking up the clay-heavy soil common to central Pennsylvania. But each person’s gardening style determines the tools they’ll need—or prefer.
In view of this, Ginger answered the follow-on question, Which tools are a waste of money? with the same observation: it’s a matter of personal style.
Test Your Soil
@hardknockwmba asked, How should I test my soil? Ginger pointed to the Cooperative Extension soil testing service. In Pennsylvania, nine dollars buys testing on a soil sample. You fill out a form on which you list crops you plan to grow, and you provide the soil. Cooperative Extension reports on soil composition including pH level, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium, calcium, zinc, copper, and sulfur. The report recommends lime and fertilizer amendments to optimize soil for the crops you want to grow.
You can request additional analyses, each adding cost to the initial $9 fee. For example, an additional $5 buys a measure of the organic component of your soil, and another $5 will tell you how much arsenic is in the soil. Ginger suggests the organic matter analysis for new planting sites. She insists that the greatest factor in your success is soil preparation, so get this right when you start. Most state Cooperative Extension offices offer soil testing services and other programs to help you succeed with your small kitchen garden. Follow this link to find an Extension office in your state: Cooperative Extension Office Locator.
If you’re into gourmet cooking, Ginger suggests, you might emphasize herbs in your small kitchen garden. When I plant tomatoes, I always plant basil nearby. To me, the combined flavors are nearly as good as candy. In my last post—Spring Planning for Your Small Kitchen Garden—I revealed the items I must plant to get satisfaction from a growing season.
What Should I Plant?
@hardknocksmba also asked what he should plant in a 120 square foot space. As you might guess, Ginger insisted she can’t answer this question for anyone without knowing them better. She proposed that you answer the following question to help decide what to plant: Why are you planting a garden? She followed it up with a few broad suggestions: If there is a lot of pasta in your diet, plant accordingly: tomatoes and peppers might dominate. If you’re into gourmet cooking, then emphasize herbs.
Ginger pointed out that some vegetables—corn, for example—take so much space to produce even a modest harvest that they have no place in a small kitchen garden. In contrast, lettuce, spinach, peas, beans, and many other vegetable plants produce food for a sustained period during the growing season.
Beyond these thoughts, Ginger emphasized: Grow what you want to eat.
More Gardening Insights
Ginger and I talked through many more questions, and I’ll report on them soon. Subscribe to Your Small Kitchen Garden’s RSS feed, or revisit in the next few days for the second installment of Answers from a Master Gardener.
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