About 18 years ago my Herban Garden was a container garden, as we were living up on the third floor of a beautiful southwest facing apartment! My patio was just big enough to be dangerous for an obsessive gardener like me, and my husband LOVED to complain that we never had enough real room to sit!
In his defense, I was using every square inch of it, up and down! It still is one of the most wonderful gardens that I have ever created.
I really think that garden saved my life and gave me a new purpose.
I discovered that it is amazing what you can grow on a patio smaller than a pool table! Even on the third floor I could provide salads for the three of us all summer! Here are the first of the tomatoes I grew that year! They were a lovely variety called “Tumbler” that are just made for a hanging basket. They are surprisingly sweet, tender and early ripening. Last year they flourished from June until October and I would go out and eat them straight off the vine with fresh basil leaves and a bit of goat cheese! I even had a small blueberry bush and miniature roses. I honestly don’t know how I fit it all up there!
I recently found these pictures of that porch garden and it delights me now as much as it did back then. Here is one small part of my container garden in that apartment, 2 square feet of it to be precise! You are looking at spicy mesclun greens that I’d been cutting since mid April, basil and Italian flat leafed parsley, fresh marjoram and lots of edible violas and pansies!
My favorite salad that year was a composition of all of these things, on top of which I would set a poached egg basted in herb butter with lots of fresh chives, frizzled porchetta and a yummy wedge of perfectly ripened Brie with a toasted herb crouton or two! Sometimes I added a few spears of freshly steamed asparagus. I would always dress it with a simple garlic and mustardy vinaigrette and enjoy it with a glass of champagne. That’s such an amazing gift from about 5 dollars worth of plants!
I just love lettuce and there is something so very satisfying about planting it and picking your own salads. Lettuce is one of the easiest container crops to grow and Mesclun mix is absolutely perfect for containers like these. Plant it, fertilize it and water it..really that's all you need to do to make it happy! When it gets a bit warmer it WILL start to bolt but usually I had enough for great salads well into July. Because the patio was covered, it was cooler and extended my growing season.
Make sure that you eat the Arugula and Mustard blossoms! They are so rich in vitamin C and so very good for you. Chop them up and mix them with chives and butter, then let that melt over grilled tuna or salmon that you've laid on a bed of your homegrown greens. The butter and blossoms make a simple yet savory sauce that's bright enough to complement the flavor of the grilled fish.
You can also grow nasturtiums easily in your window boxes, and they will absolutely flourish, providing you with lots of peppery blossoms and seed pods for your salads! I couldn’t believe how well they did. Nasturtiums are a wonderfully prolific plant to grow. For every flower that you pick two more will grow!
That same year I made the decision to grow tomatoes and strawberries in my window boxes instead of my usual flourish of flowers. I had tumbler tomatoes growing in a basket but these were different.....Sweet 100 is the variety in the window boxes , and they bore me loads of delicious tomatoes between late spring and autumn! I wasn't sure if they would fruit up on the third floor, but when I went out that morning there were loads of little babies all over the stems!
I spent that whole summer eating fresh tomato salad with nasturtium blossoms, fresh mozzarella and homegrown basil! It was wonderful!
Remember that with containers it is always all about the soil. My secret ingredient was Dr Earth Organic Fertilizer, a long lasting fertilizer that delivers food continuously for several months and contains pro-biotics, seven champion strains of beneficial soil microbes plus ecto and endo mycorrhizae. I also love their potting soil as it is well mixed and does not become too compact with the addition of plants and water. That’s the most important thing, that the roots in your container have room to stretch and grow so that they cant take up nourishment.
Also containers are more of an effort because they do need watering every day in hot weather. The other trick that I've discovered was to have larger flowering herbs growing on my little porch as well, anise hyssop and loads of lavender both of which really attract honeybees and other pollinators. I also had these planted with mints of all kinds and calendula and from the beginning they have loved each other! I have noticed much less of an aphid population in my little ecosystem and I know that it's because of the mints, other herbs and the marigolds growing in such close proximity to each other. As soon as I planted them, all the nasty pests disappeared!
One tip with containers of herbs. Don’t be afraid to over plant them. I learned this when I was working at a lovely garden center many years ago. A good sized pot can take quite a few plants. Chances are good that they will all make it. Low growers and spreaders in the front and taller herbs in the center. I’ve done this many times and the result is gorgeous , healthy containers of mixed herbs. You can plant containers of tea herbs and culinary herbs. One of my favorite containers to plant is one that I call Scarborough Faire…Parsley , Sage , Rosemary and Thyme … for good measure I always add Lavender!
I remember being so excited about this.....These are Everbearing strawberries that I planted in two of my three window boxes that year. After wondering if they would ever flower, they rewarded me with loads of pretty white blooms and a week later set tons of fruit! The trick was patience, my intuition told me to just leave them alone and let them get established underground, like raspberries do. Fruiting plants like these do their work under the soil first and then usually at the point when you are about to toss them they explode with life! I had so many that even on the third floor I had to get berry netting as the robins were greedily keeping their watch!
And what a strawberries they were........Sun drenched, juicy and sweet with just the right amount of tang and texture....The pink wave petunias are also unexpected friends, I hadn’t planted them that year but they are coming up everywhere!
Then there was the morning that I awoke to a fabulous surprise! This sunflower had bloomed, and the remarkable thing is that I never planted it! My husband teases me every year, because things just show up in my garden, and I have no idea where they came from. I like to imagine that a sweet bird friend planted it for me, maybe as a thank you present for feeding them all the cold winter! Wherever it came from, it's all the more precious because we were three floors up!
I truly loved this garden. It was my first opportunity as a gardener to create something from literally nothing, to make lemonade out of lemons. I made lots of friends those years, because everyone wanted to see it. The apartment staff used to send prospective renters to drive past it so that they could see what was possible! I was so proud of what I’d accomplished AND it gave us so much pleasure and fed us well. I still remember sitting out there (there was room for one little chair and a child could sit on the floor!) with Alex and feeling as if all was well in the world again. We had some of our best talks about life out there in that little space.
We live in a house again with an enormous side yard that I’ve turned into a kitchen garden, complete with a small orchard, historic roses for teas, jams and potpourris and plenty of herbs. However, nothing will probably ever eclipse the magic of that first small garden, born out of necessity and created with so much love.
Yours in Beauty and Magic,
Beth
My "Wild" Herban Garden
I love your article. I used to plant the whole strip on the south end of my house, for 50 years. I live in the Willamette valley in Oregon. Sadly, I have a nasty neighbor over the fence who threw something that killed my garden right across the middle of it. Now I am trying to come up with another good area where it will be safe! Thank you for giving me the impetus to start again!