Post by Paddy by Grace on Apr 7, 2010 10:05:44 GMT -7
When Planning a Vegetable Garden, Grow What Your Family Will Eat
standeyo.com/NEWS/10_Food_Water/100404.container.gardens.html
April 4, 2010
ByDebbie Arrington
Sacramento Bee
When it comes to container gardening, there isn't a lot of room for maneuvering. Space is limited, nutrients are precious and planting anything that requires an extensive root system is out of the question.
Still, that doesn't mean creativity needs to be squashed. It's just takes thinking outside the box - literally.
In The Chronicle's rooftop garden, we use three types of containers - deep, galvanized steel water troughs, large round pots and shallow square beds.
For our spring garden, we're planning to create a little ecosystem in each container that mixes the aesthetically pleasing with the practical - all with the guidance of Fred Bové, our tutor from San Francisco's Permaculture Guild. Essentially, we want an assortment of textures and layers and colors, all while keeping the soil healthy and plants happy.
The shallow square bed is our designated "Mixed Greens Collage," with lettuces, collard greens and spinach seeds all going in.
The twist comes in piling a mound of soil in the center, surrounded by a ditch. The hill should help support longer-rooted plants such as collard greens, while the ditch allows water to slowly soak in and help retain moisture for all the greens in the patch.
Meanwhile, one of our water troughs will be planted with chard and beets. While the container's depth is perfect for beets, radishes and carrots, too many root vegetables means competition for space and nutrients. So we're mixing in chard, which is mostly a leaf vegetable that won't crowd out our beets.
When everything fills out, the chard and beets leaves should make for a colorful - and appetizing - bed of greens, with the promise of the beet roots hidden underneath.
Last up, the large round pot. It holds one of our precious Meyer lemon trees, which is always seeking a good planting partner to add nutrients to the soil. We had success last year planting snap peas to help fix nitrogen in the soil, which keeps the leaves green and healthy, so we're doing it again this season.
But while the pea plants used the Meyer lemon branches as a trellis and climbed up every which way, the bottom of the pot always looked a little barren. So we're planting some edible nasturtium, which, in addition to being pretty ground cover, will help prevent moisture loss by shading the Meyer lemon and snap pea roots.
On a side note, we're also conducting a little tomato experiment that's close to our hearts. While tomatoes are notoriously difficult to grow in San Francisco because of the cold summers, we're trying out seeds direct from Italy - three varieties that come from the garden of Food section staff writer Amanda Gold's grandmother in Calabria.
As usual, we'll find out soon enough what works and what doesn't. At the very least, we won't be looking at the same flat patch of soil anymore.
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/02/HONJ1CIGNH.DTL
standeyo.com/NEWS/10_Food_Water/100404.container.gardens.html
April 4, 2010
ByDebbie Arrington
Sacramento Bee
When it comes to container gardening, there isn't a lot of room for maneuvering. Space is limited, nutrients are precious and planting anything that requires an extensive root system is out of the question.
Still, that doesn't mean creativity needs to be squashed. It's just takes thinking outside the box - literally.
In The Chronicle's rooftop garden, we use three types of containers - deep, galvanized steel water troughs, large round pots and shallow square beds.
For our spring garden, we're planning to create a little ecosystem in each container that mixes the aesthetically pleasing with the practical - all with the guidance of Fred Bové, our tutor from San Francisco's Permaculture Guild. Essentially, we want an assortment of textures and layers and colors, all while keeping the soil healthy and plants happy.
The shallow square bed is our designated "Mixed Greens Collage," with lettuces, collard greens and spinach seeds all going in.
The twist comes in piling a mound of soil in the center, surrounded by a ditch. The hill should help support longer-rooted plants such as collard greens, while the ditch allows water to slowly soak in and help retain moisture for all the greens in the patch.
Meanwhile, one of our water troughs will be planted with chard and beets. While the container's depth is perfect for beets, radishes and carrots, too many root vegetables means competition for space and nutrients. So we're mixing in chard, which is mostly a leaf vegetable that won't crowd out our beets.
When everything fills out, the chard and beets leaves should make for a colorful - and appetizing - bed of greens, with the promise of the beet roots hidden underneath.
Last up, the large round pot. It holds one of our precious Meyer lemon trees, which is always seeking a good planting partner to add nutrients to the soil. We had success last year planting snap peas to help fix nitrogen in the soil, which keeps the leaves green and healthy, so we're doing it again this season.
But while the pea plants used the Meyer lemon branches as a trellis and climbed up every which way, the bottom of the pot always looked a little barren. So we're planting some edible nasturtium, which, in addition to being pretty ground cover, will help prevent moisture loss by shading the Meyer lemon and snap pea roots.
On a side note, we're also conducting a little tomato experiment that's close to our hearts. While tomatoes are notoriously difficult to grow in San Francisco because of the cold summers, we're trying out seeds direct from Italy - three varieties that come from the garden of Food section staff writer Amanda Gold's grandmother in Calabria.
As usual, we'll find out soon enough what works and what doesn't. At the very least, we won't be looking at the same flat patch of soil anymore.
www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/02/HONJ1CIGNH.DTL