Container Gardening
Having recently moved from the big city back here to Chilliwack, the thought of actually having a few fresh vegetables growing on my patio no longer seems foreign to me. When I was a kid, I used to help my grandma garden in her backyard, something that I imagine many kids these days never have the opportunity to experience.
Unfortunately, given that I live in an urban setting, I don’t have access to a plot of land or any other area for a traditional garden. That being said, many vegetables and herbs actually thrive in containers. In fact, that whole branch of gardening is becoming so popular that it has even garnered it’s own name: Container Gardening.
A few weeks ago I decided to set up a little garden up on my patio. Depending on what you want to grow, that may or may not be possible for you, depending on how many hours a day of sunshine your patio receives. Mine actually faces south, which means it’s blanketed it in sunshine for 8 hours a day or so, enough to grow pretty much anything during the summer months. Right now I have lettuce, green onions, several types of tomatoes, basic, oregano, red & yellow peppers, jalapenos, and cucumbers.
It’s almost too late to start your own garden using seeds, but thankfully pretty much every garden center in town has a large selection of pre-grown seedlings for sale. I purchased a few of mine from Canadian Tire’s garden section, and they had pretty much every normal herb as well as about five varieties of tomatoes and three or four pepper varieties.
Given that I spend most of the day doing web development work on the computer, gardening does seem a bit of stretch for me. But so far it’s been really enjoyable, and I’m looking forward to being able to eat a salad or a tomato from the patio garden later in the summer. A really great book I picked up with information on container gardening is McGee & Stuckey’s Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers
