Growing flowers, herbs, vegetables, and fruit in containers and small raised beds may not fill the freezer, but can satisfy a yearning for an interesting, pretty, easy, and productive garden nearly anywhere with little effort. For anyone with very little space, time, energy, or mobility, plus children and other beginners.
The basic concept is to start small and build on success. Don’t jump in too exuberantly and get in over your head, because often the most valuable lessons learned the first time around will set the tone and guide what you do from then on. You can always add on more later.
Because I am more of a hobbyist than a hard-core farmer-type gardener, I stay very small scale with edibles in scattered flower beds, containers, and one raised bed. Using very simple techniques, it’s easy to keep something growing in each area year-round; as one batch gets harvested or peters out, I simply rework its soil and replant something new for the next season.
My one big effort is a single, thirty-foot long raised bed in the sunny area along a property line, where I grow stuff that needs elbow room, including sweet or Irish potatoes, corn, English and summer peas, various melons, beans, leafy greens, and sunflowers and cut flowers. The bed is only three to four feet wide so I can reach it from either side and is easy to cover with frost cloth or insect netting.
All I did was rent a big tiller to break up the soil a foot deep and then added compost and leaves to the native dirt, which fluffed it up several inches. By having it part sunk and part raised it drains well in rainy weather but doesn’t need frequent watering in dry spells. After framing it up with 2x6 boards, it is done for good. Now I just clear out old stuff, replant, and mulch, and the next time I plant I dig the mulch in which keeps it all going very well.
To keep it easy and picture-pretty, I broke the narrow strip into five shorter plots as smaller, end-to-end individual gardens separated with stepping stones. To help ward off problems I rotate different crops around, section to section, meaning I can plant and replant as needed without working up the entire garden. And I can easily move stakes and netting as needed.
This set up works very well, literally all year long, and because along the sides and in between sections I include herbs and pollinator or cut flower plants, it looks great, even to the neighbors. Oh, and at one end I have a fig plant kept pruned into an easy-to-harvest shrub, and the other end I have a group of blueberry shrubs.
But I also mix individual herb and pretty edimental (both edible and ornamental) vegetable plants along with flowers in my three front annual beds and large containers. This coming April I will replace my current kales, violas, snapdragons, and parsley with zinnias, colorful nutritious peppers, dwarf burgundy okra (fantastic, overlooked edimental), and bush tomatoes. All in with my daylilies, iris, shrub roses, and other ornamental plants.
My containers range from big, galvanized steel tanks to five-gallon buckets with drainage holes drilled along the sides near the bottom and painted to look pretty, to stacked painted tires. I mix potting soil and compost, plus a little real dirt to firm it up, and mulch everything with bark which gets dug in the next time I plant.
Easy-peasy, and pretty to boot. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss’s Horton the elephant, “a garden is a garden, no matter how small.”
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
