Keeping It Contained

This is definitely one of my favourite times of year, when everything is springing into life again. Everywhere I look at the moment, there's fresh splashes of colour as new flowers and blossoms break out. Tiny green leaves are forming all over what, only a few short weeks ago, looked like a bunch of dead branches. More and more bees are being spotted amongst the flowers... and in the middle of all this new life, my garden is rapidly filling up with various types of veges as different shaped leaves start pushing their way up through the soil.

One of my grape seedlings.

With all this new life sprouting up, I've begun the mad dash to keep up with the constant supply of containers needed to house them all. Not an easy task on a tight budget with a mostly potted garden! Especially not when my dream goal is to one day be self-sufficient, at least on the fruit and veges side of things anyway. Sure, a rather big goal for a container garden, but one I will have a lot of fun trying to achieve! So now pretty much everything even resembling a type of container is being eyed up for its plant pot potential. Our recycling bin has never looked so empty each week!

Yoghurt pots, McDonald ice-cream sundae containers, juice/milk/soft drink bottles, margarine containers, old cage or bunk bed pieces (great to use for climbing plants)... even old shoes and drawers are getting eyed up as something I could possibly stick a plant in. Things like empty cardboard toilet rolls, egg trays, and even egg shells are also getting used for growing seeds in, especially for things that don't transplant too well (coriander is one that can throw a bit of a fit if you repot it, as it hates having the roots disturbed, also any root vegetables like beetroot, carrots, etc), as you don't have to remove these "containers" when you plant them due to them being biodegradable.

Part of my potted garden on the front porch.

As things get bigger and outgrow their recycled housing, I do end up buying pots, and my 3 favourites would have to be: the standard 10ltr bucket you can usually find for 99c-$2, the 40ltr flexi tubs that people often use for storing toys or use as washing baskets (the Warehouse usually has these for about $7 each), and the black 35ltr recycled plastic pots from the Warehouse for $7.99 (I use these mostly for my fruit trees/plants). The 10ltr buckets will be what each of my capsicum and tomato seedlings go into (1 per bucket), and the bigger pots will be used for pretty much everything else. When money gets a bit too tight and I need big containers for my veges, I've also started using polystyrene bins, which can often be gotten for FREE at some supermarkets in their fish section if you ask nicely.

Knowing that a lot of the Summer fruit and vege plants I'm now starting to grow are very heavy drinkers (tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchinis, eggplants, capsicums/chillies, pretty much all berry plants, etc), and just how bad water restrictions can get over Summer, I've also started looking into wicking and self-watering systems. There's a few different ones I want to try, but at the moment I'm just adding a coke bottle with several holes poked into it into every single big pot I do up, which I'm finding keeps the soil watered for longer, so the plants aren't needing to be watered as often. It's now that I'm starting to be almost thankful for my partner's love of soft drinks, plus the amount of juice and milk the kids and I consume, which used to seem like a lot, is now suddenly not enough!
Drink faster people, I need the bottles!!!

I use large plastic rubbish bags as liners, and the boards as a base
(you could use chicken wire instead, but I don't have any) in the tyre
to make each tyre into a portable garden.

My flower garden is also slowly growing (or not so slowly as the case may be, thanks to a lot of kind and generous gardeners from the Facebook groups), but with my main focus at the moment being on my food crops, I've had to find other options for good sized containers to house all my decorative plants, so that I can keep the good ones for my edibles. Easy solution: old tyres! Asking around at car yards etc, it wasn't long before I'd built up quite a good wee stash of old tyres that I'm now working my way through, turning them into mini flower gardens that brighten up patches around the front yard quite nicely.

They actually fit quite a few plants in each and can be fun to arrange into bigger gardens, but the bigger garden ideas I have for them may have to wait until I have somewhere with more space. I know some people use them for planting edibles as well, but after reading mixed opinions about the toxins in the rubber leeching into the soil, I personally don't want to take the risk of them potentially also leeching into my food crops and therefore end up eating them, so they're for flowers and other decorative plants only here.

Of course, if you've got the space, then there's all sorts of other things that can be used as well. I've seen people turn old window frames into cold frames, old bikes become something for climbing plants to latch onto, old baths/hollowed out logs/kids' outgrown trolleys turned into planters, ladders covered in pots with hanging plants, wooden pallets turned into all sorts of different shaped planters... even old swimming pools (both the proper adult sized ones and the kiddie sized clam shell shaped paddling pools) have been turned into gardens! The only limit really is making sure it hasn't previously contained toxic chemicals, and definitely make sure it's food safe if you're planting edibles (eg: don't use something that's covered in lead paint or had petrol in it before to plant your veges in!), and making sure you can put drainage holes in it. 

I'm learning that gardening, even in containers, doesn't have to be expensive! All you really need to create a garden, whether to brighten up your yard or put food on the table, is a bit of creativity, good resources, and the willingness to try. Check your local library's garden section, visit garden centers, see if there are any community gardens nearby (most towns seem to have at least one or two of these now, which is fantastic to see!), get to know other gardeners, browse the internet to find other ideas for containers or join some of the gardening groups on Facebook or elsewhere on the Net. Just jump in and give it a try... before long you'll be enjoying homegrown veges and/or flowers, and if you are anything like me, constantly trying to figure out where you can fit in "just one more plant"!