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IF you
live in the city, you might have a fire escape, balcony
or back patio abutting an alley instead of a yard. Your
landscape is iron, wood, brick, concrete. It’s an
unlikely place for nature, which makes it an ideal place
for an urban garden. An urban container garden, that is.
Anything grown or planted in the ground can be grown or
planted in a container, and generally with more ease. In
containers, you control the quality of the soil. You
minimize the chances of wrangling with weeds. You can
relocate pots for aesthetic or growing purposes (such as
moving inside during the cold season). And most
important for the amateur urban gardener, you can start
small and work your way up.
Now is
the time to start planning. Take a look around your
living space, inside and outside. Find that spot of
utter urban banality and get ready to conjure some
horticultural beauty on it.
Where to
start
Proper
gardening involves time and money, so determine your
goals. Do you want to grow for show, or to feed
yourself, or to attract certain birds and insects? Do
you want to grow from seed (more work-intensive but
cheaper) or buy ready-made plants and flowers (easier
but more costly)?
Ambition
is one thing, and space is another. You can vow to
recreate the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, but that
doesn’t mean you should try it on your 6-square-foot
back patio that gets zero direct sunlight. Observe how
much sun your potential garden space gets, and plant
accordingly.
Also,
don’t try to mix full-sun and shade plants in the same
garden; that kind of high-wire chlorophyll juggling is
best left to the experts.
Start
with containers at least 10 inches in diameter. If
you’re putting containers on a wooden deck or balcony,
make sure the structure can hold the weight. (Big pots,
filled with soil and watered regularly, can be very
heavy.) And think vertically: With limited space, the
solution to gardening grandly is climbers.
“Pole
beans grow vertically. Do them on a chain-link fence or
up the fire escape, and keep plucking them and eating
them the whole summer,” says Matthew Roberts, manager of
Ginkgo Gardens in
Washington. “Sunflowers are surprisingly easy. You’re
going to want to get the dwarf kind. They grow up 4 to 5
feet....and they just rock.”
How to
make it pop
An
amateur container gardener must consider three things
before planting: form, texture and color. A good
container garden has vegetation of varying heights
(taller plants in the middle or in back, surrounded by
shorter plants and bordered by drooping, viny plants),
as well as flowers that provide a constant or staggered
show of blooming. Apart from height, make sure you have
a variety of shapes and textures.
“Look to
use different leaves,” says John Peter Thompson,
chairman of Maryland’s Behnke Nurseries. “Pointy
sword-type leaves that grass or gladiolas would give
you, fuzzy and round leaves and leaves that are indented
or serrated. Looking at texture, some leaves are hard
and shiny, some soft and fuzzy. Planting a perennial
like lamb’s ear gives you something to touch.”
The most
important and striking variable, though, is color. Hot
colors such as red, yellow and orange seem closer to the
eye than cool shades.
So if
you want to make a small urban space seem bigger, plant
blue or purple flowers, whose colors make them appear to
recede.
Give
equal consideration to the leaves. “There are
green-blues, green-yellows and green-reds, and thinking
in terms of sticking to all one kind or contrasting
different greens,” Thompson says, is as important to the
garden’s color palette as the other parts of the
rainbow.
It takes
some time
Container gardens require monitoring, but not too much.
Check on
the garden daily. Walk around it with your morning
coffee, looking for disease, infestation or yellowing
leaves (a sign of overwatering). If you check on your
containers regularly, you’ll be familiar enough with
their general appearance to notice any changes.
“If you
can devote a couple hours every week, that’ll probably
take care of it,” says Kathy Jentz, editor and publisher
of Washington Gardener magazine.
Containers dry out quickly, but that doesn’t mean you
should stick to a strict watering schedule. Merely
feeling the topsoil isn’t enough to tell whether the
whole container garden is getting what it needs. The top
may be dry while the roots are soaked. Thompson
recommends thoroughly soaking a pot and then lifting it
to get a feel for its weight. When it becomes
significantly lighter, that’s when you water it again.
If
you’ll be away for a while, get a friend to water your
garden, or put water-storing granules (such as Soil
Moist) in the dirt to buy yourself some time.
What to
buy
§
A good
pair of gloves.
§
The best
potting soil you can afford. “The key to success is
living, viable soil with all the beneficial microbes you
can get,” Thompson says.
§
Plastic
containers. Terra cotta or clay pots are heavier, don’t
retain water as easily and can crack. Try a couple of
Rubbermaid crates, with drainage holes drilled in the
bottoms; line them up to create a de facto garden bed.
Or consider buying an EarthBox, a self-contained system
(www.earthbox.com).
“The water resides down in this reservoir in the bottom,
so instead of watering the top, you pour down a side
chute and the roots reach down, which prevents
overwatering and dehydration,” Roberts says.
How to
avoid mistakes
All
first-time gardeners make mistakes. If you know what to
avoid from the outset, you’ll have a head-start.
First,
don’t seed or plant too far apart. “You can put plants
closer together than you might think,” Roberts says.
Don’t
try to grow plants that aren’t appropriate for your
area. Research their sun and soil requirements.
Make
sure your pots have adequate but not too much drainage.
All plants need sunlight and water, but they also need
plant food. Basic Miracle-Gro or a comparable product
will do the trick
There
are a wealth of resources available to keep your
mistakes to a minimum. Visit your local nursery and ask
experts. Sign up with Internet discussion groups; read
magazines; peruse web sites (GardenWeb at
www.gardenweb.com is cited as a trusted source); seek
out local master gardeners; or contact UConn’s Home &
Garden Education Center (www.ladybug.uconn.edu).
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