Everything in this beautiful basket was grown in containers — mostly metal garbage cans and old farm buckets — in our backyard.
We’re still pulling in a few tomatoes but they’ve turned as soggy as the early fall weather. The change in season spurred us to take delivery yesterday of 40 bales of straw, which we’ll use to mulch beds, put around the chicken coop as insulation for the winter and lay down in the new container beds we hope to build before the snow comes.
It’s been difficult leaving these sweet Golden Beets and Purple Haze Carrots alone long enough to grow up.
Under the guise of thinning, we’ve enjoyed many yummy bite-size babies from among these container-grown vegetables.
As for the future, we think the carrots stand little chance of remaining in the ground long enough to reach their fabulous adult deep-purple color.
“They distinguished themselves by going from reasonably normal to unquestionably insane without ever pausing at peculiar.”
From T.R. Pearson’s “A Short History of a Small Place.”
Eds. Note: It may be stretching it to think we were ever “reasonably normal.” But all the people who last winter asked us, “What do you do with all those garbage cans?” now know because the many cans of the Gimpy Garden are overflowing with fruits and vegetables. It’s heavenly eating tomato a sandwich anytime we feel like it.
A sample of the luscious Black From Tula tomatoes ripening so fast we can barely keep up with eating them and giving them away to friends.
We planted 12 varieties of tomatoes in 30-gallon metal garbage cans this year. The cans produce tomatoes earlier than planting them in the ground because the sun heats the metal and starts warming the soil early in the season.
This year we experimented with planting a variety of small melons in containers and the one we’re happiest with is this Golden Midget Watermelon.
Its foliage resembles oak leaves so it’s a lovely addition to the containers by our patios, and the exterior of the melon turns golden-yellow when ripe so there’s no guessing about when to harvest them.
We got the seeds from Seed Savers, one of our favorite places for unusual and old-fashioned herbs, fruits and vegetables.
Reinvent it. That’s our philosophy of gardening.
Here we’ve put an old enamel cooking pot filled with Italian basil on a pedestal in front of our Purple Haze carrot bed, which is an old farm trough.
In a few weeks vines will have filled in the trellis wall behind the trough, the carrots will be bushy and tall, and the basil will have gone to pesto and salads and be replaced with ornamental cabbage for the fall.
Cait & Marty came across this sturdy old wash tub at a store that recycles building materials. The legs were bad and had to come off, but the tub was in good shape and makes plants very happy.
Since the our garden comprises mostly containers, our garden is not laid out in rows. Here we stuck a Turks Turban squash in with an old-fashioned Straight Eight cuke and ran a couple of yellow and white bean vines over the sides.
As you can see, it makes for a wild romp of vines and fruit.
If you were reading us when we first started, you have seen this outstanding video. It’s been a long time since we watched it and since we believe in recycling, here it comes again:
Stack and Grow planters, and their kits, are a very Gimpy friendly idea for patio and balcony gardening.
The lightweight planters roll on wheels for ease-of-use. Their design gives you the ability to grow a great variety in a small space and you can buy extra components to expand your planters vertically.
As Cait told Marty: “This could help someone maintain their love of gardening if they move to a smaller home. You really could still be in the game with something like this.”
Stack and grow planters come in four colors. The maker also sells ready-to-grow herb kits and strawberry kits for the planters.
We rank Fine Gardening by Taunton Press among the best fun-to-read, gorgeous and informative gardening magazines.
We read each issue cover-to-cover, dog-ear the pages, share the ideas and store the issue for future use in the Gimpy Garden. In the dead days of winter, the arrival of Fine Gardening reminds us we will bloom and grow again.
The writers at Fine Gardening appreciate container gardening and this link to their Web site provides some wonderfully creative videos and articles about gardening for patios and small spaces and using containers in ways you might not have thought of.
