5/27/2012 0 Comments Container GroupingsI have a small city yard so I have come to appreciate container gardening. I pretty much fill any space I can with plants, including the driveway! I already learned from Gayla Trail (You Grow Girl) that anything can be a planter but in reading McGee & Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers I learned how to upgrade your collections of containers into nice groupings. The photo to the left shows my driveway collection... the square and round terra cotta colored pots in the back were taken from a neighbor's garbage pile. They are in fine condition, but color is a little dated so I put them in the back. The green plastic one in front of it next to the garage I happen to have for years, along with the off-white plastic one in the front. The taller metal one I found at a local garden store marked down to $3, it just didn't have drainage holes so I had to drill myself. Which is obviously the same case for the dresser drawer also taken from a neighbor's trash pile (I also lined with landscaping cloth before adding the dirt). And the last shown in this photo is the large metal garbage pail I bought at Home Depot for $19 to plant potatoes in the bottom and herbs on top. The photo below shows my Daisy admiring the collection (she has a thing about watching me plant then immediately digging up my work!). Another tip I learned from a lecture by Gayla is that even those reusable shopping bags make a great garden. She recommends potatoes, which is what I put in this bag. It worked great, but already had a small hole in it so at the end of the season when I harvested and tried to move the bag it fell apart. Also, notice the bricks in front of the bag. When filling the bag with dirt, it kept getting wider. By putting the bricks in front of the bag and the back of the bag against the fence the dirt would go the depth needed for the potatoes (making it wider would be ok for other things but potatoes need the vertical space). The bricks are also the trick in the book to making a good grouping. Bricks are placed under planters to help elevate them to make an interesting arrangement. The smaller round pots used 3 bricks underneath as feet, the big trough took 4. The pots in the back I put rectangular shaped bricks that aren't as pretty under them to elevate. Here's the same grouping above one month later in June. Potatoes are in the trough, metal pot and bag. Chives in the round green & off-white plastic planters. Turnips in the drawer. Herbs are in the metal pot and trough. Tomato plants are in the back plastic terra cotta colored pots. Also pansies were added throughout for color. Oh, and a watering can to catch the rain. Notice I was also patching up some bare spots in the yard and dropped grass seed, but I kinda like it!
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