Your next mission, should you decide to accept it, is to come up with the most creative planting system you can find. It must be as close to free as possible and allow you to garden in a wasted space.
I belong to the sustainablecountry forum and was perusing their garden forum this morning. I found a thread for gardening where there is no space. It got my creative juices flowing as I often hear from family members that they can’t grow food as they have no space when they actually have a lot of space. It’s just full of things like inflatable pools, swing sets and boats, gazebos, play yards and lawn ornaments. The forum displayed such solutions as truck bed liners made into raised bed and hanging planters made from over-the-door shoe holders.
I grow some citrus in the house and a few herbs but not much else. I use the greenhouse for winter salad greens but I’m still intrigued. I am thinking about green beans. I have the light and a bush plant really doesn’t take up much space. So how about it. What’s the most creative planting idea you have?
I’m going to pretend I’m talking to my sister. I would suggest she drill some holes in the bottom of that old boat that hasn’t seen water in years. Filled with soil and compost, she could grow enough beans for a year if she used some season extenders. That pool could be turned into a kind of greenhouse for lower light plants. The gazebo could hang tomatoes and peppers from the edges and an herb garden would be happy underneath. I’m thinking the swing set would support some squash and cucumber vines and she could plant grow grapes along the top piece. I would get rid of all the lawn art and put in hedges of raspberries and blueberries and plant dwarf fruit trees in the open spaces. The flower beds could be replaced with potatoes, carrots and onions and peas and beans should do nicely on the chain link fence that surrounds the play yard. The play yard itself would hold eight raised beds for beets, chard, kale, peppers, strawberries, asparagus, leeks and turnips.
Now for the garage. Right now it holds the overflow of junk from the house. The cars can’t be parked inside anyway so call it a day have a tag sale. With the space freed up and some money in her pocket she could now grow mushrooms and have a place for bulk storage of staples as well as to put in a counter for some food processing equipment. I would add some water barrels to the exterior and keep two fifty gallon containers in the garage too. She could even add window boxes.
I forgot about the pool house! She needs a chicken coop and I’ll bet a few rabbit hutches would fit on the deck! The cool thing would be to connect with the neighbors. It’s a small, family friendly little subdivision with a lot of unemployment. Wouldn’t it be nice to form a neighborhood association and discuss using the open space for a couple of goats? Okay. I’m stretching a bit here but a girl can dream, can’t she?
I strayed a bit from my intention which was to talk about the creative use of scavenged planters but this was fun. My poor sister has no idea what I just did to her neat little suburban house. She’s home drinking coffee and watching Regis and Kelly and I have her milking goats and gathering eggs.
October 29, 2010 at 8:23 am
I feel it’s largely a matter of motivation. If you *want* to grow food, you’ll find the space to do it. If you don’t, well, then any excuse will suffice not to. If producing food is truly the priority, you can do far more than most people ever imagine in very limited space. Beans on the fence. Fruit trees in containers (figs, citrus), or espalier-ed against a wall, or lined up with a pathway. Quail pens and hives for honey bees have tiny footprints. Replace the forsythia with hazelnut, elderberry, blueberry, or Nanking cherry. Potatoes in 5-gallon buckets on the porch. The ideas are out there.
Wendy over at Happily Home posted a while back on urban apartment dwellers who rigged up hydroponic window gardens. Doesn’t meet your cheap as possible requirements, but it was impressive in what it did with “no space.” Also, Homegrown Evolution posted a picture of an *amazing* window garden from NYC, I think. This was probably a couple years back. The space was tiny but abundantly productive.
October 29, 2010 at 9:04 am
A friend of mine uses enamelware pots & pans that have rust spots to start plants. What about old tree stumps? Could they be hollowed out (if not already) & used somehow? I saw something recently old wine bottles (& I would think water bottles, milk jugs, etc) being used as an automatic watering system. That may come in handy in the smaller containers.
October 29, 2010 at 10:15 am
I actually taught a couple of classes and gave talks about this! My absolute favorite was taking a cane seat chair that was headed to the dump because the seat was broken and using a piece of window screening (available in nylon on bolts at hardware stores). I simply stapled the screening in the removed seat and filled with planting material. I’ve used boots (holes drilled in the bottom), old olive oil cans (top removed, holes punched)for basil and oregano, but I have to say that I like tires. Tires take 500 years to decompose in the dump and too many places don’t recycle them like they should. I get mine free from people who don’t want to pay $5 to take them to the dump. I just fill them with soil and compost and plant in them…I put my herbs in them and made a garden area out of them. The herbs don’t spread and with mint, anything that keeps it contained makes me happy. Next year, we are putting in a moon garden, but I think I’ll use white painted tires for it.
Another popular thing is to use it an old bed frame to make a “garden bed”.
October 29, 2010 at 11:09 am
That’s so cool! What exactly is a moon garden?
October 29, 2010 at 2:22 pm
I trash-picked a Finding Nemo water table by the side of the road and converted it into a shallow planting nursery for young lettuces. I can wrangle it onto a garden cart and wheel it to the sunny or shady side of the yard to give the seedlings what they need. It’s cute as a button, and more useful than it would have been in a heap at the landfill. Donna
October 29, 2010 at 2:43 pm
That’t the only good good use I can think of for a finding Nemo water table. LOL What a good idea!
October 29, 2010 at 3:44 pm
I loved your final graph. (I have a sister just like that, bless her.)
My favorite nursery in town has a dropoff/pickup bin for recyling pots of all sizes. I’ve gotten some great pots there for free in sizes ranging from 2″ starters to 2′ deck planters. Worth calling around to see if your local nurseries might do the same.
Craigslist often has rubbermaid-style 18+ gal bins for free. This guy’s put together a great guide for making self-watering containers out of them and practically any other plastic container you can think of. I’m using some in a gravel-filled side yard that unfortunately gets the best sun in our entire yard.
http://www.seattleoil.com/Flyers/Earthbox.pdf
I’ve grown potatoes in an old wheelbarrow belly and in well-perforated rubbermaid containers. This year I also used the frame of a home-built rat cage (a rectangle of four white-coated wire shelving lengths cable-tied together at the corners).I took the base and lid off and filled the cage with compost, using books of decomposing leaves against the sides of the cage to hold the soil in. We ripped out the shrubbery in the front yard and planted a line of raspberries on the south side, built a water-retaining berm on the east side near the street and planted that with strawberries, perennial fruit bushes such as serviceberries, currants and gooseberries and a few stray raspberries. I had zucchini, onions and tomatillos growing on it last year (for some reason I didn’t plant on it this year. I’ll have to remember to mulch it well and plant some annual veggies on it next year.)
October 29, 2010 at 4:03 pm
Several years ago a friend and I were driving through town. Looking for yard sales no doubt. But what we found made us turn around and go back and have another look. It was a small place in town and they had taken out all there grass and planted garden. Even between the sidewalk and the street. There were even small fruit trees there and pole beans climbing the fruit trees. And the fence between them and there neighbors even had grape vines crawling along it. Around the main part of the house they had planted tomatoes and pepper plants.
October 29, 2010 at 7:42 pm
Live in HOA restricted home in SW FL. Because of the soil, or lack thereof, we grow in containers. My husband even made ‘raised’ beds out of odd pieces of hurricane shutters that are placed outside our lanai. Outside we also use bags of potting soil with the top cut out and laid on a cement patio – raise wonderful green beans in those – and are in the 3rd year of use. Sun is really hard on anything plastic.
Inside the lanai we use Earthboxes, any large pots we can find, 5 gal buckets, lightweight plastic basket liners, hanging pots, old topless styrofoam containers (altho these are now recyclable), lidless pots with about an inch of gravel for drainage, waxed cream cartons for seed starts and also holey baggies.
I’ve used the steel basket from inside the washer, lined battered bike baskets, burlap bags from rice make nice hanging containers, badly dented colanders make great little herb gardens, I’ve even stacked old grapevine wreaths about 4 high and filled with soil.
Frankly, anything that drains and holds soil will work for me.
We have 2 rain barrels, and I put 5 gal buckets under the roof supports in the lanai to collect water when it rains. We keep a watering can under the condensate outlet of the AC, collect about 2 gallons overnight which I use on the container growing figs at the end of the driveway.
We have as foundation plantings, raspberries, persian lime, carambola, bahamian tea, a 3 foot rosemary, mango, blueberries, kiwi, mint and garlic chives and a raised bed of broccoli. As long as it’s neat it meets neighbors and HOA’s criteria.
October 29, 2010 at 8:52 pm
Wow!!! I would love to see pics of that!
October 31, 2010 at 12:46 am
In my neck of the woods a moon garden is a garden with white blooming flowers…in the moonlight they glow.
October 31, 2010 at 7:31 am
That sounds lovely.
October 31, 2010 at 9:32 am
a Moon Garden is a garden bed that’s is usually set aside from other beds for maximum impact. In it, you plant only white flowering plants and plants with silver foliage. Evening primsore, silver thyme, lambs ears, baby’s breath, artemesia, chamomille, white roses, daisies etc.
You can go out in the middle of the night and see it practically glowing!
November 1, 2010 at 7:44 am
was going to mention the negative conotations to associations as some authoritarian strong arm extortionist group demanding rights and controls to other peoples propertys, perhaps you might call it a garden club, of which ive seen planting public propertys with “beautification permits” one of which i worked gratefully for years upon years, without complaint or complaints……
November 1, 2010 at 5:06 pm
Our front hollies are trimmed up high due to being overgrown when we moved in. Everyone else puts flowers or ground cover in front. We do too. It looks like an odd elephant ear. Of course, you look closely, you might find there’s summer squash or green beans among the leaves.
Our HOA either hasn’t caught on or doesn’t care since it fits in with everyone else’s landscaping. I do not put anything out in public that vines. It has to stand upright and look normal next to everyone else.
The vines went in the raised beds in our backyard (behind a fence) and promptly took over the yard.
Next year, I might try decorative hot peppers under the front bushes.