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A Book From Your Small Kitchen Garden
A book about preserving food from Your Small Kitchen Garden! Buy it at Yes, You Can
Yard Birds
Adorable, handcrafted, folk art. Yard Birds add whimsical flare to any garden, yard, or entranceway. Click here to find a Yard Bird for your kitchen garden.
Links to planters at selected vendors:
Sprouts
Amazon.com is a terrific source for certified organic seeds intended for home sprouting. Dress up salads, stir-fry, sandwiches, spreads, and other dishes with homegrown sprouts of all kinds. Follow this link to order your sampler or to find home sprouting kits.
Small Kitchen Garden Store
Find the perfect gift for any kitchen gardener--or find products to help get the best from your own small kitchen garden. To save you time, we've selected products from Amazon.com that received the best customer reviews. Click here to visit our store and pick up the perfect gifts for any small kitchen garden enthusiast.
Posts Tagged ‘small kitchen garden’
Compost for a Small Kitchen Garden
September 2, 2008 | 
Author If you want to start a lively discussion, ask the experienced owner of a small kitchen garden about compost. With as many opinions about compost as there are gardens, the whole topic can be mind-boggling. It might seem as though compost is a magical garden elixir that requires incantations by compost wizards to produce. But it just isn’t so.
Compost is what it is
Compost is decayed organic stuff—usually organic stuff that decays easily. (The dry compost in the photograph started out as grass, autumn leaves, wood ash, and vegetable peels.) Throw the right organic stuff into a pile where it’s exposed to moisture, warmth, and what lives in soil, and it’s going to decay. In fact, moisture and warmth is enough to promote decay, but things that live in soil accelerate composting.
The advantages of composting are few, but considerable:
- Composting consumes garbage (lowering dumping charges)
- Composting produces plant food for your small kitchen garden
- Composting produces humus that can improve the texture of your garden soil
Your composting efforts can be as simple or as involved as you want—pretty much in line with your gardening efforts. If you’re a passionate owner of a home kitchen garden… or you really want to become a compost wizard, then find a cooperative extension office in your area and learn what they teach about compost. Our local extension service occasionally runs seminars at which they give away compost barrels, and yours might too.
Different Methods for Different Spaces
Depending on the space you can afford for compost, and the amount of organic waste material you produce, you’ll have specific challenges with specific solutions. For example, if you barely have space for a small kitchen garden, it may seem you have no space at all for compost. But you can compost on a very small scale by becoming a worm farmer, which we’ll explore in-depth in a later post.
You can also find composting machines designed to work in your kitchen. These can be fully-automated with computerized environment controls and filtering to promote appropriate decay with minimal odor. If price is no object, a composting appliance might the perfect addition to your small kitchen garden.
On a slightly larger scale, compost barrels are handy in limited spaces, with an added advantage that they can significantly speed up composting. After that you’re into compost bins and heaps, and these can be relatively small or as large as you’re willing to let them become.
Your Compost Philosophy
Are you going to compost everything you possibly can? Can you wait for compost, or do you want it yesterday? Do you enjoy chemical testing, stirring, turning, and putting dirt through a sieve? Oh, you can do it all… but you don’t have to.
Being lazy, I encourage you not to put a lot of energy into compost, but my approach isn’t for everyone. In my next post, I’ll describe my composting activity, and point out its advantages and disadvantages.
Here are some articles that provide further perspectives and tips on composting:
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PLANT FOOD RECIPE: Making Compost – SUPPLIES One 4 foot x 4 foot x four foot container Pitchfork Watering can or hose. INGREDIENTS. 2-3 wheelbarrow loads of green stuff such as grass clippings, weeds, kitchen plant material 2-3 wheelbarrow loads of brown stuff, …
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Mistakes Making Compost – wet-heap-july. Another wet and rainy day and all I can think about is the compost heap (well may be not all). We all slip up, drop clangers and get it wrong so I thought I would list some of my own errors or lash-ups. …
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | 
Tags: compost, small kitchen garden | 
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Anything for a Small Kitchen Garden
There’s a fundamental philosophy behind my fascination with the small kitchen garden: don’t bother planting something if you’re not eventually going to eat it. Sure, I enjoy looking at flowers, and I admire the attractive displays of my neighbors. However, I really despise yard work (including gardening). So, I try to reduce the labor involved in every aspect of growing my own produce.
Smaller is better
It’s a lot less effort to till a seven foot row than it is to till a twenty foot row. If I want twenty feet worth of beans, can I get it out of that seven feet of tilling? It’s less effort to fill a pot with soil and plant herbs in it than it is to dig up a spot in the garden, fight back the weeds, and manage herbs there. Especially were there no garden space already cut out of my lawn, I’d look for simple strategies to use whatever space could accommodate with the least amount of sweat equity. Hence, my emphasis on the small kitchen garden.
With emphasis on small, you can quickly end up in the realm of “clever.” For example, those trellises against your house that have useless (but attractive) clematis threaded through them could, instead, support an early crop of peas followed immediately by a climbing bean. The hole in your lawn left when you removed an old stump could handle two staked tomato plants. If you have to grow sweet corn (I put it this way because sweet corn takes a lot of space to produce very little corn), fall back on the classic trick of planting climbing beans as well that will use the corn stalks as trellises.
Plant vegetables for decoration
Patios and decks offer opportunities to squeeze more food out of your yard. Rather than planting flowing ground cover along your patio or path, try a salad pack of lettuce seeds that combines several varieties of lettuce in the same envelope. The leaves provide decorative color variation at your outdoor events, and a salad course at many meals. Instead of clumps of flowering plants along your house’s foundation walls, plant broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbages of differing colors and sizes. Of course, climbing beans are a fine choice to plant at the base of each of your deck’s support posts—assuming they get adequate sunlight.
I recently saw a small kitchen garden that really spoke to my heart: I passed a house at which the Township authority had cut down a tree in the boulevard, leaving a large, low stump between the sidewalk and the street. The homeowner then planted a hill of squash, and trained the plants over and around the stump! It’s an attractive ground cover that will produce an abundant crop (see photo).
If you want to grow your own produce, there’s almost always some way to get it done.
Your Small Kitchen Garden
A kitchen garden is a garden intended to grow food rather than flowers and other ornamental plants. For the truly ambitious, this can mean planting thousands of square feet with dozens of varieties of plants. Such a garden results in so much produce, that its owner must give food away, or freeze and can it so it doesn’t go to waste. Let’s define a Small Kitchen Garden as one that you and your family will consume as the food becomes ready.
Here’s a short list of variations on a small kitchen garden:
- A modest flowerpot growing your favorite herb
- Window boxes holding an herb garden
- A homemade germinator producing bean sprouts on your countertop
- One or more large planters on your porch or deck holding vegetable or fruit plants
- A small plot in your yard growing rows or clusters of vegetables
A Small Kitchen Garden is Easy
Growing your own food is easy to do, though as busy as we all seem to be, we may shy away from gardening. The key, as with most hobbies, is moderation: plan small and keep it simple, and you can fit at least some gardening into your life. A lot of plants—especially vegetables (and tomatoes which are fruit)—require very little effort, and return enough to offset the expenses of planting and maintenance.
Trent Hamm, author of http://www.thesimpledollar.com offers some useful thoughts about getting started:
“What to plant? …examine the food that you want to eat as a result of the garden.”
He goes on to suggest:
“…don’t just plant whatever you think should be in a garden – instead, let the food you want to eat lead you towards your planting choices.”
A Small Kitchen Garden Saves Money
There are as many reasons for growing a small kitchen garden as there are things to grow in one. Hamm’s motivation is to save money:
“A healthy, well-cared-for main crop tomato plant, like a Burpee’s Big Girl, can easily produce 100 pounds of tomatoes by itself, something that would cost you at least a dollar a pound at the grocery store.”
How much you save depends on the size of your garden and the frugality of your approach to it. Plant foods, insect treatments, seeds, and cultivation all have price tags. You can avoid them by selecting hardy plants, by growing extras to make seeds for future planting, and by making and using your own compost.
But growing your own food is economical even when you don’t work hard at it. You might spend two dollars for fresh basil in a grocery store, and four or five dollars for a pot, soil, and some basil seeds. One planting in late spring could provide all the fresh basil you’d want through the summer and fall.
Read Trent Hamm’s article in its entirety on his web site at: http://www.thesimpledollar.com/2008/03/04/planning-a-kitchen-garden/
A Small Kitchen Garden is Healthful
Gardening, like so many other activities, leads the experienced to comment: “You can’t really appreciate it until you’ve succeeded at it.” Produce that you’ve just harvested from your own plants is highly nutritious, and generally more flavorful than produce you buy at a grocery store. Tomatoes above all else absolutely rock: at a grocery store I’ve never bought a tomato that even remotely resembled a home-grown tomato.
A garden can engage the whole family. In fact, getting youngsters involved may expand their palettes. When I was a kid, I simply wouldn’t eat tomatoes… until a neighbor invited me to help plant his tomato garden. Later that year, I would snack on his tomatoes, though I insisted all others–including the ones my father grew–tasted bad. I also learned to eat pea pods in my neighbor’s garden. It’s possible your kids would be more interested in eating produce they helped to grow than they are in a serving of unspecific origin.
Here are links to other articles that provide encouragement to grow a small kitchen garden:
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An Easier Way To Designs For Kitchen Gardens – A small kitchen garden exudes an old-world charm that gift-wraps the entire place in an exotic quotient. The heady mix of fragrant flowers and delectable vegetables and fruits can be quite intoxicating for any gardener. …
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What the people say about… Kitchen Gardens – I planted a small kitchen garden all along but I have increased the size now because the prices for food items went up in the shop. I was even forced to increase the prices for my food and I have to hear a lot of comments from customers …
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You Can Create Your Own Garden Even If You Live In An Apartment – Even if your apartment doesn’t boast an extended balcony, that’s not a problem, as when it comes to gardens, size doesn’t really seem to matter and even the smallest square can support a small kitchen garden. …
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A cat in the kitchen » Blog Archive » My window garden – I have a very small kitchen garden, at the kitchen window. The plants are my babies; sweet cherry tomatoes and nice smelling Basil and Coriander/Cilantro. The Chili pepper plant hasn’t bloomed yet, but I’ m keeping my fingers crossed that I will get some fruit later on.
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