Imagine stepping outside in the early evening and filling a basket with the ingredients of tonight’s salad: bronze-leaf and dark green Simpson lettuce, arugula, and scallions, along with a few chives to garnish the soup. Picture an early-summer Sunday picnic in the park. You’ll bring your famous potato salad, made from tiny new red potatoes and sugar snap peas and garnished with blaze-orange nasturtiums, and a big jug of lemonade intensely flavored with lemon balm and spearmint—all from your garden. Fast-forward in your mind’s eye to late summer, and the gazpacho you will make from your homegrown vegetables: tomatoes so perfectly ripe they practically hum, crunchy bell peppers, and sweet-crisp lemon cucumbers.
Wait just a minute, you may be thinking. That’s all well and good for you country types, but I live in an apartment building. I’d love to have fresh vegetables and herbs right at my fingertips, but all I have is a balcony so small I can hardly turn around on it.
Do not despair. Even if your only “garden” space is tiny, we’re betting you have room for at least one large container. And with that one container and a little planning, you can do amazing things.
This is a book about growing good things to eat—vegetables, herbs, fruits, and edible flowers—in containers. It may come as something of a new idea that you can grow food on your balcony or patio, but stop and think for a moment: if you can grow pansies in a pot, you can grow peas in a pot. Both need about the same conditions, but one will give you dinner.
We wrote this book for everyone who aspires to have garden-fresh foodstuffs but has no yard in which to grow them. If you live in an apartment, town house, or condominium, or on a houseboat, you may be a container gardener out of necessity. But we think this book will also be useful for those whose traditional garden area is not well suited to growing vegetables. We imagine, too, that even those with an existing vegetable garden might find it convenient to add containers on a porch, patio, or deck, close by the kitchen or the outdoor grill.
For all these situations, we invite you to consider the many advantages of growing your bounty in containers:
• With one exception, every facet of every gardening task is simpler because you are working in a small area. Preparing the planting area is a simple matter of filling a container with premixed soil; your tool of choice is a trowel, not a shovel or a rototiller. Your back will thank you. Harvesting is easier, too, because there is less bending over. Checking for early signs of damaging insects and other pests is simpler because the plants are close at hand, and preventive measures are easier to manage because you have a smaller number of plants.
The one exception is watering. Whereas in the traditional garden it’s a snap to set up an oscillating sprinkler and just let it spray the entire area for an hour or so, containers need individual attention. Making numerous trips back and forth with a watering can is a tedious chore, all the more tedious because containers dry out faster than garden beds. In Chapter 5, we suggest ways you can simplify this task.
• Containers are mobile. You can move them around like furniture, grouping and regrouping them into combinations that give you pleasure, offer convenience, and take advantage of changing growing conditions as the season progresses.
• You can completely eliminate one worry that haunts traditional vegetable gardeners: soilborne diseases that persist in the ground year after year and are nearly impossible to eradicate.
• Container gardens almost never have weeds.
• Because your space is limited, you are forced to think about what you really want and how much of it you can realistically use. You’re less vulnerable to the common error of overplanting.
We have observed that, for whatever reason, most of the books and magazine articles about container gardening assume that you want to grow only flowers. We have nothing against flowers, but we think it’s time for vegetables to come out of the closet.
In this regard container gardens and in-the-ground gardens are alike: vegetables get no respect. All too often they are relegated to the rear of the house, away from public view, considered too homely and too messy to be presentable. Recent interest in nicely designed kitchen gardens, with their endearing country charm, and the more sophisticated potagers has begun to dislodge this notion, and it is no longer considered startling to suggest that some vegetable plants are attractive enough to be integrated into the perennial border. But these approaches are only at the bud stage. The prevailing notion with vegetables still seems to be that people like the results but don’t admire the horticulture.
This is keenly apparent with container gardens, where vegetables have frequently been a mere afterthought, and no attention has been devoted to their aesthetics. Even people who have created a handsome container garden gloriously filled with ornamental plants seem to include only one vegetable, if that: a lonely tomato, hidden away in an inconspicuous corner, not pretty enough to be part of the real garden. It is this way of thinking that we hope to influence.
Here’s a quick guide to how the parts of this book are arranged.
The chapters in Part One are designed to help you organize your thinking. All gardens involve some sort of trade-off between what you want and what is possible, and in many ways the delicate balance is even more delicate with container gardens. So in these first chapters, we look at the aspects you need to consider: what kind of space you have, what you’d like to grow, and ways to make it beautiful as well as bountiful. We believe that all gardeners, experienced and otherwise, will benefit from walking through these steps.
The chapters in Part Two deal with the how-tos of making and maintaining a successful container garden. If you have been gardening for a while you probably know most of what is presented here, but if your experience has been with the usual in-the-ground gardens, it wouldn’t hurt to quickly scan these chapters for pointers specifically geared to container gardening.
The heart of the book is Part Three: individual descriptions, organized encyclopedia style, of the vegetables, herbs, fruits, and edible flowers that can be grown successfully in containers.
The Appendix includes the U.S.D.A. Hardiness Zone Map and Mail-Order Sources of plants, seeds, and garden supplies.
Throughout, you will find descriptions of special Theme Gardens, where several different plants are grouped together, in either one large container or several smaller ones, to create a special look or feeling. We describe the interrelationships of the plants, why we chose them, and how they work together to enhance one another, but do not go into detail about growing the individual plants; that information will be found in each plant’s own encyclopedia listing. So if you already know about growing rosemary, for example, you might want some new ideas for combining it with other plants but don’t need the full how-tos; on the other hand, if you’ve never tried growing rosemary, you will want to study the basics in the Herbs chapter and then explore the several theme gardens that incorporate it.
Every plant in every theme garden is edible; nothing is included in this book, in fact, unless it is edible. However, while we name the plants that make up these theme gardens, we see them only as suggestions and idea-starters. It is our intention, and our hope, that you will let your own imaginations fly free and create your own theme gardens.
Part of every new adventure is learning its vocabulary. Gardening, like all other adventures, has its own language.
In home gardens, all plants belong to one of two major categories: edibles and ornamentals. Edibles are plants grown to be eaten: vegetables, herbs, and fruits. In recent years, we have added edible flowers; in this case, “edible” implies both palatable and nontoxic. Ornamentals are plants grown for their visual appeal, whether that appeal comes from flowers, striking foliage, interesting bark, or what have you. In this book, where the word “edible” doesn’t seem quite right in a sentence, we sometimes use the one word “vegetables” as a kind of shorthand for the bulkier, all-encompassing phrase “vegetables, herbs, fruits, and edible flowers.”
We also find it necessary from time to time to contrast container gardens with regular, in-the-ground gardens. The term we use most often for the latter is “traditional garden.” If you have such a garden but hate the idea of being thought traditional, remember that this is just another bit of writers’ shorthand—no disrespect intended.
Another way that garden plants are distinguished from one another is by their growth cycle. We say that plants are annuals, biennials, or perennials. Annuals go through an entire cycle—from seed to new plant and all the way to producing seed for another generation of plants—in one growing season. Biennials live two years: the first year they make mostly foliage; the second year they produce flowers and then seeds for the next generation. Perennials, in the garden sense, are plants that live more than two years. Technically, this would mean that trees are perennials. But as gardeners use the term, it applies to plants that are not trees, not shrubs, and not bulbs but that still live for several years. Usually, the word refers only to plants that die back to the ground in winter and sprout new growth in the spring.
Why do you care? Because it affects your planning. If you want to grow a perennial that is tender (meaning easily damaged by very cold weather), you’ll be happier if you put it in a small container by itself so that you can move it to shelter in winter. If you want to grow perennial herbs and annual flowers in the same container, just be careful not to damage the roots of one when you’re planting the other. And so on.
As a broad rule of thumb, most vegetables are annuals, most herbs are perennials, fruit trees live many years, and edible flowers are a mix of annuals and perennials. Some plants that would technically be classed as biennials or perennials are, as a practical matter, usually treated as if they were annuals. That is why in the encyclopedia listing there is a specific heading: “Grow as.”
Finally, perhaps the biggest terminology bugaboo of all is Latin names. They are critically important to botanists, horticulturists, breeders, and all other plant professionals; it’s the only way to know for certain which specific plant is being discussed. Many home gardeners enjoy knowing and using the scientific names, which often have a very interesting etymology, but many more are confused and intimidated.
Here’s a quick refresher. The Latin name has two main elements, which are italicized: the genus (spelled with a capital letter) and the species (lowercase), as in Salvia officinalis (culinary sage). Each genus can have, and usually does have, several species. When two or more species of the same genus are discussed together, the genus name is abbreviated after the first mention, as in S. elegans (pineapple sage).
In this book, we elected not to use scientific names except where confusion could otherwise result or where the information being discussed called for it. Generally, genus names are not necessary with edible plants: a carrot is a carrot is a carrot. Even where species names differ (as in the two sages named above), in edible gardens the common names almost always suffice. What is frequently important, however, is identifying a particular cultivated variety, or cultivar, which is written in roman (not italicized) type, with the first letter(s) capitalized. If you are designing a large container with a pink color scheme, for instance, you want to be sure you get a monarda with pink blossoms (Marshall’s Delight, maybe) rather than red (Adam, or Jacob Kline).
The urge to watch something grow, to help it along, is a powerful, almost primeval impulse. So is the deep human need to beautify our environment, to take what we find and make it better. And so too is the yearning to link ourselves with nature, to know that some part of the natural world, no matter how small, is just over our shoulder.
All these threads of human desire come together in making a garden. By surrounding ourselves with growing green things, we make nature accessible, we put beauty at our fingertips, and we experience the joy of witnessing and nurturing our plants’ development. Like a midwife, like a parent, we help them come healthy into the world, begin to grow, and finally flourish. It is that sense of wonder, the visceral pleasure of direct physical contact with beauty, that makes gardeners what they are.
Both of us love gardens and gardening for all these ethereal reasons. But we hold a special reverence for gardens that produce food. In these gardens we get to witness, over and over through the season, that proud moment when a seedling elbows itself up through the soil and demands its rightful place in the world. We revel in the taste, texture, and shining good looks of beautiful vegetables harvested just moments ago. We appreciate the safe feeling of knowing where our foodstuffs came from and under what conditions they were grown. Food is life, and growing your own is an experience of immense enrichment and affirmation.
None of this is any less true for people who live in large cities. The yearnings to watch something grow, to be connected with nature, are not diminished because the opportunities are fewer but may, in fact, be felt even more strongly.
It is our hope that with this book you will find the inspiration and encouragement to create a garden even if you have no land. From your bountiful containers, you will soon have the very great delight of serving a meal made of fresh things from your own garden, grown with your own hands and heart.