Container gardening.

Thought I would start a new thread instead of hijacking Morganthe's thread Farm/Food Bill up for its 5 year review - influences food choices & prices further.

UlrikeDG said:

JaRylan, I've seen some seriously amazing container gardens. Check your local library for books.

Another good solution for getting locally grown fresh veggies (besides the farmers' market, which is also awesome) are CSAs, Community Supported Agriculture. The Local Harvest site can help you find one nearby.

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Thanks for the link. I think some of the containers are so cool - hanging planters that let you grown tomatoes or strawberries upside down, stackable wall pots, potato bins.

This site gives a nice little summary of container gardening with some beautiful pictures.

Cool, thanks.. I want a little garden, but don't have the ground space at my old house and no dirt at all here in the apt..

Thanks. The hanging tomato pots look cool.

My favorite container garden is the Earth Box (www.earthbox.com). Totally maintenance free if you set up a watering system!

My mom bought some a few years ago and I thought she was crazy. But then she got a bumper crop of everything. My regular garden produced zilch. She gave me an Earth Box and I was actually able to grow vegetables for the first time. I get a new one each year, this year I'll have 7 of them!

Except for the squirrels eating my strawberries before they turned red, it has produced great and lived up to every thing the website said.

Momto2whosews said:

My favorite container garden is the Earth Box (www.earthbox.com). Totally maintenance free if you set up a watering system!

My mom bought some a few years ago and I thought she was crazy. But then she got a bumper crop of everything. My regular garden produced zilch. She gave me an Earth Box and I was actually able to grow vegetables for the first time. I get a new one each year, this year I'll have 7 of them!

Except for the squirrels eating my strawberries before they turned red, it has produced great and lived up to every thing the website said.

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I couldn't get your link to work (the parenthesis at the end is in the url by mistake).

Those are cool. How much do you grow in one box? What do you grow?

Sorry about the link. It should be www.earthbox.com .

The website has a lot of detail about how many plants fit in each container - it all depends on the type of plant. So far I've grown pumpkins & zuchinni (I combined them in one Earth Box even though they don't say to do that - but they don't say you can't either). We had decent sized zuchinni ripen every few days. My pumpkin (only one plant) wasn't going to win any size awards, but it was perfectly plump and round.

I would have had a TON of strawberries, but the squirrels and chipmunks ate them all before they got to get ripe. I did have a ton of tomatoes - you have to stake the plants. Probably more than we could have eaten if the squirrels hadn't taken the ones that they did. I also lost a bunch to blossom end rot before I knew better. I grew corn last year and got one ear per plant and had about 6 plants per box. I also grew a bunch of basil and lettuce that was more than we needed. This year I'm going to have cherry tomatoes, lettuce, basil, parsley, zuchinni and pumpkins and strawberries.

This year I'm going to drape them in netting to keep the squirrels out. We used to have a stack of old bricks piled up right next to my boxes and it was like a chipmunk condo with their restaurant right next door!

I should also mention that I'm an extremely lazy gardener. My mom set me up with an irrigation system and ran the little tubes directly into my Earth Boxes, and then set up a timer to water every day. The boxes have an overflow hole so you can't overwater. And they have plastic covers (I have the old style boxes) so you don't get weeds. All that's really left is to keep the critters out, stake the tomatoes and keep after the blossoms on the bottom.