Container Gardening – Big Results In Small Spaces

Now that it has officially ended, I think I can safely say that this past June has been the rainiest I can ever remember in my 41 years here in the Ohio Valley. I can hardly recall a day over this past month where our plans weren’t derailed because of rain.  Between a freezing May and this past June, I’m still ready for summer, but as a person with an interest in gardening, I couldn’t be happier. So far this year, our “garden” is absolutely thriving without us having to be out there watering every day, as we typically have to this time of year.

My wife and I have been into gardening for at least a decade at this point, and I have found the experience to be both very cathartic and very enriching.  It takes effort, no doubt, to get plants to produce as hoped, but I find the rewards far outweigh the work.  Gardening has given me a much deeper appreciation for biology, nature and, especially, gastronomy.  It’s also been an enjoyable and educational activity to do with our kids. When we lived in Glen Dale, we were fortunate to have a nice, sizeable piece of flat property in which to garden.  Not acreage or anything like that, but a big enough area to grow a pretty productive garden that provided enough produce to eat right off the vine and can and store for use during the winter. However, we moved to Wheeling a couple years ago and were not so fortunate in our new home when it came to flat land to plant a garden.

But we weren’t about to simply abandon the prospect of fresh produce, we could just walk outside, pick and eat, so we knew we had to come up with an alternative, since we no longer had the luxury of open, flat space, and that’s when I discovered container gardening.  I had always believed that one needed a pretty decent amount of space, particularly vertical space, to successfully grow food, to give the roots a chance to dig deep and spread out.  But since we started growing in containers, I’ve been consistently impressed at the amount of produce we’ve been able to get out of our plants in a much smaller space.

Although we’ve had pretty good success overall using a variety of different sizes and types of containers, we stumbled upon something called the Garden Patch Grow Box a couple years ago that has proven really tough to beat.  These Grow Boxes have allowed us to keep gardening at just about the same rate as when we had a plot of land, and they make gardening about as easy as one could hope.  With these boxes we haven’t really missed a beat growing full-size tomatoes, peppers, cukes, onions, herbs, beans, squash and a whole variety of other vegetables.  The beauty of the Grow Box is that it is self-watering.  The Box contains a reservoir at its base that you simply fill with water every so often, so the plants always have a readily available supply of water to feed as much as they need.  Granted, come August, we’re out there filling the Boxes with the tomato and other heavy-feeding plants just about every day, but we’re confident that the water is getting used by the plant roots and not simply evaporating away in the baking summer sun.

We’ve set up a number of these Grow Boxes on our deck, and we’ve actually been able to grow about the same amount of food in about a quarter of the space we were previously using when we grew directly in the dirt.  The Grow Boxes come with a fertilizer strip to use when you first get started, which is nice if you’re new to gardening, but the strip is just basic 10-10-10 fertilizer, and we’ve simply been using good top soil and compost the past couple seasons and haven’t noticed any drop-off in production without the fertilizer strip.  We installed a rain barrel, attached to the downspout on our deck as well, which has already paid for itself in terms of reducing our municipal water usage.

For anyone thinking about getting into gardening, I have found that containers are actually a very good way to start.  Not only can you better control the conditions for optimal growth, but I’ve also found that having your plants very close to, if not inside, your house makes it much easier to remain diligent in watering, controlling insects, and staving off plant disease to give yourself the best chance for success.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned about horticulture these past couple years, it’s that containers definitely aren’t just for house plants.  For anyone who’s considering container gardening, below are some helpful links to get started.  Happy Gardening!

http://containergardening.about.com/

http://extension.illinois.edu/containergardening/

http://www.rodalesorganiclife.com/garden/container-gardening