Vegies in Small Spaces

Ever increasingly people have less room for gardens. With the explosion of the 'house behind' phenomenon across my city many people have only a small paved area for their outdoor table and chairs and that's the extent of their garden.

Inner city living has also become very popular with a large number of (mostly younger) people living in apartments in the CBD or very close to it. At best they get a balcony where they can have some plants.

Viva Le Pot!
No, no, not *that* kind of pot! You can still grow some vegies to munch on even with severely restricted space.

Whilst I have a large backyard I still grow things in pots - vegies included!

For the last few months I have been growing snow peas and lettuce in a large pot on my back patio:
It's looking rather sad at the moment as we had a storm a couple of weeks ago and the snow pea plants broke off in the wind. However up until that point it was going very well and still has peas and flowers that will turn into peas (if the plant stays alive long enough!):


None of these snow peas made it into the kitchen - this is the kind of thing I plant so I can go out in the garden, grab a handful of peas straight off the plant and straight into my mouth; talk about fresh food!

This is the reason why I chose to put these into a pot - so it was close to the back door of my house. When coming home from work, or going back inside after doing some work in the yard, I can just grab a few peas and enjoy their deliciously sweet crunchiness :).

To support the pea plants I simply put three tomato stakes (for international visitors these are 1 inch square hardwood stakes about 8 feet long) into the pot equal distance around the rim and tied them together with garden string. The string keeping the stakes together also act as somewhere for the plants tendrils to take hold and grab onto for extra support.

There were between 6 - 8 pea plants in this pot. Here's a pic from a different angle so you can see the supports:

Down amongst the bottom of the pea plants there are some lettuce. These are now not doing so well as the pea plants grew so well the lettuce were a bit starved of light. Here's one of them - yes it's a purple lettuce (apologies for the out of focus pic - still working on the close up feature of the camera):

So there you go, even if you only have room for one pot then you have room to grown some vegies. About 6 hours of sunlight per day, some water and, if you must, some fertiliser and you'll be munching your own fresh produce in no time :)

'Til next time, happy gardening everyone :)