Gardening Without a Garden and Experimenting With Earth Boxes

You Can Always Go Up!

Even though your small garden is limited in square footage, you can always go, or better yet, grow, up. You can maximize on space in a small garden by growing vining and trailing varieties of plants and making sure that they trail up, instead of across the ground. In a vegetable garden, cucumbers, beans, squash, pumpkins, and even watermelon can be grown on trellises. When you plant vegetables on a trellis, you can get a huge harvest of vegetables from a significantly smaller amount of space than if you had planted them traditionally.

One of the best things about planting your vegetable garden on a trellis is that your vegetables won’t get rotted from sitting on the ground. Air is also better able to circulate around your plants causing them to grow larger and be much healthier.

Another twist on the idea of growing our small gardens up is to plant many things in hanging baskets. It is amazing, how many plants you can fit on a small balcony or patio. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can grow tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, and herbs in hanging baskets. Since hanging baskets take no space on the ground, they leave you lots of room for traditional planting.

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These photos were taken on July 24th. As you can see by the size of the tomato plants the plants did not grow very large, but I am very happy with the yield. My two cherry tomato planters have given me dozens of clusters of delicious tasting tomatoes. I have one Big Boy plant in the center planter that has about a dozen tomatoes, but none ripe enough to eat. The herbs that I grew on top of the basket were a success, but you have to be diligent on watering because they do stay thirsty. I was disappointed with my Thyme. I do have a little, but most died before they even got started.

I don't have much room in my little garden area, so I decided to do something different this year. I bought coconut shell hanging basket planters and planted my poor little tomato plants upside down on May 1st. It took about a week for them to wake from their shock and then they took off. I planted thyme, basil, tarragon and parsley on the top and a kimono plant for color. It saves a lot of garden space and there is about 20 tomatoes on the middle big boy plant and dozens of tomato's growing on each cherry tomato plant.

These photo's were taken on July 24th. For the past 3 years I planted peppers and tomatoes in Earth Boxes with great success. Again, I have very little room in my garden. This year I decided to plant eggplants. I have never tried eggplants before and planted 3 plants in my Earth Boxes. Although, the pictures that I took do not give the the boxes justice there are over 10 large eggplants growing right now with about 2 dozen flowers ready to start more. I probably will plant eggplant next year in the Earth Boxes, but I would recommend only 2 plants to a box. Three makes them crowded, but I am very pleased with the yield.