Container Vegetable Gardening: A City Dweller's Adventure, Part 2

There are great resources to cut down on the cost of supplies. This is what I did to get around those hefty price tags:

Containers: you don't need to go to the store and buy planters. Any container that can hold dirt and survive the weather is fine. This includes:

• Buckets (like the $5 paint buckets at places like Home Depot)
• Wine crates (most liquor stores are ok with handing these over for free)
• Reusable cloth shopping bags
• The bags that the store-bought dirt comes in. Just open the top of the bag, plant your veggie, and recycle the bag at the end of harvest
• Old, broken wagons (these are best for shallow-soil veggies like lettuce)
• Drawers from a dresser that's being thrown out
• Trash cans

I mean, really, anything that will hold dirt and won't be destroyed by water will work. Just remember that they need to be able to drain. This means have holes in the bottom (which you can make with just a hammer and nail, or an ice pick, a drill, whatever) and it needs to sit at least an inch or two off the ground (you can set the container on bricks).

If these options aren't for you, try looking Craigslist.org for free planters, or try Freecycle. I complained about the price of containers in my Facebook status, and a friend told me to come get her old containers that her husband bought but was never going to use. You can also find really great deals on planters after Labor Day. As soon as you see Christmas decorations going up at stores, run right over to get great deals on containers, dirt, all that stuff. Those deals won't help you if you're looking to start gardening right this minute, but they're great money savers on stuff you'll use next year.

As for dirt, there are endless possibilities. First, getting dirt from a public park, forest preserve, etc is actually illegal in most places so don't bother. Next time you see a construction site, go talk to someone there to see if you can haul off a little dirt. They usually don't care, but you have to ask first.

My favorite source of free dirt came to me every other week at my boring desk job. We had a company that cared for our office plants, and every other week they changed out the small flower pot on my desk. I asked the guy if they were just throwing out the flowers and he said, "Yeah. Why? You want this? Here take it. Enjoy!" So every other week, whether I liked the plant or not, I took it home and lovingly nurtured it, watering it, talking to it, giving it a good home. None of them lived longer than two weeks in my apartment. So I threw out the plant, but saved the dirt in a shopping bag. I also saved the plastic container the plant came in to use when my seedlings sprouted. From November to March, I managed to get one and a half shopping bags of dirt for free.

So go now, and get your reused containers and dirt. Ask your friends, relatives, and neighbors who garden about their gardening tips. Seasoned gardeners are usually pretty excited to help out novices and sometimes they'll throw some freebies your way - food spikes, gardening gloves, planters, etc. I'll post more on this as the season goes on.

Container Vegetable Gardening: A City Dweller's Adventure, Part 1

I'm lucky enough to live in a city that embraces green living. Chicago embraces green living, from a sprawling public transit program to the environmental programs at city hall, and even our beloved Museum of Science and Industry, we embrace our environment.

Another wonderful part of my life is my back porch. I live in an apartment building that has shops on the first floor and apartments in the upper floors. Right outside my back door is a large rooftop that gets lots of sun all day long, and this is where I grew a tomato plant in a large container two years ago.

This year I'm really branching out. With the patient help of Maria at Green Home Experts, the knowledgeable folks at Home Depot, and the endless info from the web (GardenWeb is a vast fount of info), I'm going to plant tomatoes, eggplants, and sweet peppers in containers this year. Almost all of it will be experimental. This post is for those considering growing veggies on a balcony or similar settings. After a lot of reading and asking the sort of questions that exasperate people, here are some basics:

First, gardening is expensive. A self-watering container (where you can put the water in the bottom and the soil slurps up the water from the reservoir in the bottom) are usually $25 each. You have to pay for dirt. Dirt. As in that stuff you track in on your shoes and sits around largely unused in parks everywhere. And dirt is expensive. Then there's the cost of plants (or seeds and seeding trays), plant food, and all the superfluous crap everyone tries to sell you that you don't even need.

Second, unless you have a really stellar situation, you're not going to grow enough food to cut down significantly on your grocery bill. At least not in the first year. In fact, if you're growing enough plants in containers to really supplement your grocery bill it will be a few years before you save enough at the grocery store to cover the costs of supplies.

Third, the dirt you get from a bag isn't as good as dirt from the ground. The ground has whole ecosystem in place with great bacteria (no, really, it's good) that really help your plants thrive. Try to get some garden dirt if you can. You don't need to fill up the whole container with it, but it's good to have some in there. The great news is that gardening in containers really, really cuts down on the weeds.

Lastly, please don't go hog wild at the nursery. Figure out what you'd like to try, keep in mind what you're really willing to take care of (if carrying water out to your balcony for eight plants is too much work, cut it down to something manageable), and ask lots and lots of questions about what you're planting and your plants' needs. Make sure you know how much sun your gardening area gets, because if you don't know that then your questions are really hard to answer.

Don't let gardening intimidate you! Some plants will flourish and some won't, and each time you learn something new. Just keep one thought in mind: "There's always next year." With the diverse resources available online and likely around town, you can get really great advice from people who are excited to teach you things. I'm a novice myself, and in this blog I'm going to bring together some hints and tips I've found to help ease others into the wide, wild world of container gardening.

My tomato plant is PMSing...

I got a tomato plant from the farmers' market a few weeks ago. It shot up like a weed, got a bunch of blooms, and now it's got little green bulbs on three of the blooms. They're not actually tomatoes yet, they're swollen ovaries. Yeesh. Sounds like something out of 7th grade health class.

But this is so much better: