If you love salads but have very limited space to plant a vegetable garden, you might try a "salad bowl garden." By confining the little garden to a flower pot you can grow this just outside your home or apartment, or on the deck or the patio if you have either.
I knew a woman who grew her leafy garden all summer long this way and picked lots of her salads from her little outdoor bowl. Here is one way to do it:
Choose a container with a wide top and that is at least
5 or 6 inches deep. It can be made of clay or plastic, but it must have drainage holes in the bottom. Fill it with a lightweight potting mixture - either a soil-less type or regular potting soil.
Before planting, it needs to be thoroughly moistened. This should be done a few hours before planting. It should not be soaking wet.
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You can use started transplants from your garden center, or you can use seed. Plant any of the following: lettuce - looseleaf kinds work best; garden cress, parsley, Swiss chard, onion sets, radishes, bell peppers, cherry tomatoes, grape peppers or other compact peppers.
Set the garden where it will get at least five or six hours of sun a day. Bowls of lettuce without other veggies will get by on a little less. During the hottest part of the day, lettuce will need to have some shade. That's another advantage of the bowl gardens; you can move them into the best part of the day when needed.
Keep the soil uniformly moist but not soggy. If you are going to be away for a few days, use a drip type of watering system or get someone to water the pots daily because drying out will be a serious setback to the little gardens.
Apply small amounts of fertilizer (half-strength) when the plants are 4 to 6 inches tall and every two weeks after that. If you use the greens often, you will keep them down that way. I hope these grow well and you get enough to eat from your own garden.
There are other veggies you can grow with your flowers - in a pot or in a garden. For instance, a lot of people who don't grow vegetable gardens do care for a tomato plant in their flower gardens. You can do that anywhere the plant won't be disturbed. Go ahead and prune it or however you treat tomato plants in the garden. Fertilize it as you do your salad bowl.
Give the plants plenty of room. Planting along a path is fine, but make the path roomy enough. If the plants are located where nothing bothers them, they should give you a crop of tomatoes. It's good to choose early varieties.
Check around to see if anything else will do well planted out of the garden. Some people plant cucumbers because they know they aren't going to harvest them very early - in other words, they aren't going to make pickles. They want the cucumbers for the table. But allowance must be made for the wildly clambering vines.
Or how about planting a vegetable garden?
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Readers can reach Forum gardening columnist Dorothy Collins at dorothycollins@i29.net
