In another [post] the idea of porch and kitchen gardens was introduced. Growing herbs and some vegetables in containers in your own kitchen (if it has a sunny window or two), on your deck, porch or patio can be a lot of fun, and can lend personality to your environment through the different types of containers you choose and arrange.

There are some great ideas out there, as well as some wacky ones. You can add height with hanging planters, accessibility with window boxes, depth with different size containers arranged in groupings. You can build your own, go ‘thrifting’ at your neighborhood garage sales and secondhand shops, or raid the shed, garage, basement and attic. Heck, you can even put those discarded fixtures from when you remodeled the bathroom to eclectic use!

Old copper teakettles, worn out cowboy boots, old 55-gallon trash cans with holes (metal or plastic, cut short), old buckets, boxes and drawers… anything that will last awhile in the weather, can be made to drain water and will hold dirt can be made into a planting container or patio/yard conversation piece.

How about an old toilet with flowers growing in the tank and a bird bath in the bowl? An old claw-foot bathtub on the patio edge with a recycling fish tank water pump fall, water lilies and goldfish? That rusty old oil space heater can be sanded and painted, set in the kitchen or porch corner to hold that gallon-size copper kettle full of basil.

Old Easter baskets can be turned into hanging containers, just line with plastic and attach some chain or rope. Those 55-gallon plastic trash cans can be cut down and filled with enough dirt to grow tomatoes, peppers and herbs all planted together and trellised into nice arrangements. Paint them any color you like, add some decals or designs.

Coffee cans and cookie tins make excellent planters for herbs. Your kids’ old toys and wagons work nicely as containers, either for small succulents (in the bed of that big old Tonka dump truck) or a nice clip-able lettuce crop. An old chest of drawers can make a very nice kitchen planter, with drawers opened step-wise and sectioned with boards to hold dirt only in the space of their opening.

Check out some of the cool links below, and see what you can create from the ‘junk’ you’ve got sitting around!

Links:

6 uses for your old bathtub

Weird, Wonderful and Whacky Planters

Unusual Ideas for Planters

DIY Network: Container Gardening

In the last post I talked a bit about planning to use your yard space in such a way as to minimize expanses of lawn that serve no purpose other than making you mow them regularly. Before getting into the fine points of ‘naturalizing’ your yard space, I wanted to talk a bit about planning your herb and kitchen garden.

This is the most fun and useful bit of growing green things any homesteader can do, and it will add a great deal of pleasure to your living space with wonderful scents, beautiful plants and flowers, and the tastiest fresh herbs for your cooking that you could ever find anywhere.

In addition to culinary herbs that you’ll use a lot of, there are some handy medicinals that can also be grown in a yard-based herb garden, and more herb seed and plant suppliers are offering these usually wild-growing seeds, roots or plants for home gardeners and yard ‘naturalizers’. Which means you won’t have to displace any wildings in your area in order to grow your own supply conveniently to your kitchen.

Some will find it easier to begin with potted herbs on a shelf or sunny sill in the kitchen proper, then add to the collection with pots and stands arranged on the porch. Or you could grow your herbs in pots on the porch and just move the most commonly used into the kitchen during the winter. Some will want to plan a formal or informal herb garden to take up a significant portion of the yard, with raised beds and walkways covered with fabric and mulch, pebbles, flagstones or bricks – no mowing, and weeding raised beds isn’t too much of a chore.

I’d go ahead and advise collecting the herb seeds and plants you most want to grow from a supplier and starting them in pots even while you’re planning and constructing a more formal garden space in the yard. You can always get more later, and the root-propagated herbs you’ve already got growing will just keep on multiplying as you get more and more accustomed to dealing with them.

Choices should not begin with anything particularly exotic, just the basics that a homesteader will use a lot. Parsley, thymes, basils, rosemary, sage, chives, tarragon. Be wary of the pretty herbs you’ll want to plant in your garden but tend to become invasive – the mints, nasturtiums and wormwood are the worst offenders. Even out in the garden it’s a good idea to keep these crops in containers. Otherwise they’ll grow right past your bed confines, into your paths, into other beds, and show up in places you don’t want them and can’t seem to get rid of them.

When you plot the garden – even if it’s all in containers – be careful of the height requirements for the different herbs. Things like dill and fennel are tall and gangly when they’re grown, not really strong enough to hold themselves upright and more than three feet tall. If you plant them close to the path border they’ll fall right over onto the path and make a mess of your pretty design. Put them at the back of the bed, preferably against a fence, wall, or planting of self-standing taller plants like 5-6 foot tall sunflowers (very pretty!), or a stand of Joe Pye. Joe Pye can grow to 10 feet or more in height, but will stand and when in bloom is a better butterfly attractor than butterfly bush!

Conversely, you’ll want low-growing plants near the path borders. Thyme is good for this, and will tend to creep over the border. It smells great, is beautiful in bloom, and more useful than phlox. Chives behind the thyme gives an 8-inch level and the purple poms of their blooms are lovely. If you plan properly, the growth levels in your beds will complement the flowers and herbs they front or support, and everything will be easily accessible.

And if you choose to take up a chunk of the yard with an herb and kitchen garden, don’t forget to plan the veggies you grow as carefully as you plan your herbs. Establish some perennial beds for such herbs as rosemary and sage, and such edibles as rhubarb and artichokes. I have seen a kitchen garden centered around an artichoke patch that was beautiful. ‘Chokes can grow to 10-12 feet, and if you don’t harvest the buds in time they go on to become huge purple thistle-like blooms. Surrounding these are the shorter Jerusalem artichokes, which are a wild sunflower. You’ll be digging for some tubers in the fall, but artichokes have to be separated every year too, as does rhubarb. When you thin these perennials from the formal kitchen garden, you can always transfer the excess to a section of your truck crop garden, where they’ll happily keep right on producing food even if you let the formal plantings just look pretty.

Lettuces, several colorful varieties of kale and chard, even dark green collards can be planted in spaces among the herbs, harvested and replanted two or three times through the season, and they will add to the beauty of your plantings. Lettuce and kale also grows well in pots or flats, so can also be part of your porch or window garden. I like the leaf lettuce mixes, where you get everything from light yellow-green varieties to deep purple oak-leaf lettuces. When the plants get 2-3 inches tall, just clip them off (leaving half an inch) with a pair of scissors and you’ve a fine young leaf lunch salad. Spinach can be grown this way as well – these plants have shallow roots, the flat need be no more than 3-4 inches deep. Mix good potting soil with real garden dirt to get the most nutrition from the plantings, and it’s okay to fertilize with a little Miracle-Grow or organic fish fertilizer once a month.

Check out some of the resources below or seek your own on the magazine racks or library. Once you’ve aimed your mind in the direction of growing things, you’ll begin to notice there’s information everywhere! Take your time, start with some pots and cuttings from a friend, or try your hand at mixing good dirt and planting seeds. You may find you’ve a positive flair for it!

Links:

The Herb Garden

Kitchen Herb Garden

The New Kitchen Garden by Anne Pavord

Planning Your Homestead Landscape

I’d like to take a bit of a break from the hard (and not hard) physical work of basic carpentry, plumbing, maintenance and repair around the homestead. We’ll get back to these subjects often enough over time, as there is always work to do. Let’s talk about living things, because one of the very best parts of choosing where you live is choosing the living things you’ll get to live with.

There are other aspects of how one chooses to live that are important if you’re planning to have a happy life without trading a majority of your time for money you have to pay to other people to keep your own life going. Ideally a committed modern ‘homesteader’ has been smart enough to seek his or her ‘stead well away from the gated communities of Yuppie retirement dreams, farther out in the ‘real’ countryside where land is still reasonably cheap and little old ladies on some zoning board aren’t spending their lives making yours miserable.

Even a single acre of land is easily 4 times the space of your typical suburban development lot, offering a considerable amount of room for growing herbs, vegetables, fruit and nut trees, a few grape vines, even some useful wildings to encourage birds and which can produce useful products for the family. The very last thing you want is an acre of boring lawn to mow once a week when you could be doing something fun – or just relaxing in your hammock in the shade of the grape arbor, drinking lemonade.

If you’ve an acre or two or three, the next thing you need to do is develop a plan. What you plant, where you plant it, and how much work it requires to keep up with are all serious considerations, and these must have a long-term view. What’s the house like, what will enhance its beauty and functionality as part of the land, what your outdoor play-spaces should be and look like, how you can make it work for you as both sustenance and income, etc., etc.

Even on an acre or more, the actual yard space – the areas covered by grass that require mowing, trimming and must endure lots of traffic in nice weather – can be kept to a minimum by planning your landscaping carefully. Pathways can be paved any number of clever ways, grades can be stepped just as cleverly, beds can begin right at the edges and go up from there with native perennials (these can be shade, partial shade and sun-growing, depending on your needs) that start just a few inches tall and are backgrounded with ever-taller plants and shrubs. Pebbles, seashells, rocks, used bricks and old timbers make great edges and rises, can serve as planters themselves, and the plants can be put into landscaping plastic and covered with mulch to keep grass and weeds at bay. It looks better than a boring flat expanse of grass and adds to the value of your homestead.

If you’ve too much an expanse of treeless green when you start, you’ll want to plant trees for welcome shade and to anchor landscaped garden spaces. Sure, the pretty weeping chokecherries, Bradford Pears, redbuds, dogwoods, tulip trees and Japanese maples are lovely yard trees for purely aesthetic reasons. But if you want flowering trees, fall colors and nice shade there are some wonderful grafted miniature fruit and nut trees you could plant instead for about the same price. Then you’d get the added benefits of fresh cherries, plums, apricots, peaches, pomegranates, almonds, hazlenuts, pecans, apples… whatever suits your taste buds!

Many a homesteader will choose to put a “Kitchen Garden” in whichever part of the yard is closest to the kitchen door, hopefully on the south, southeast or southwest side of the house. Many houses already have a kitchen porch or deck, or a handy homesteader can build one. It’s definitely worth it! This smallish porch or deck should be the first part of the kitchen garden. You can grow a variety of culinary and medicinal herbs right in pots and flats on the porch, and arrange them at levels around a seating space to make a comfy spot for morning coffee or late evening tea.

If there is an enclosed porch that can be insulated with plastic during the winter, the outdoor pots can be moved there during the winter, or even moved indoors to a sunny window. Basils, sage, rosemary, thyme, parsley… these culinary herbs are pretty to look at as well as tasty in your diet. And they can all be grown in pots.

If winters are mild you may wish to just replant the annuals every season, and rely on the kitchen garden off the porch for salad greens, dark green leafy’s like kale and collards, cabbage, peas and such that will grow well in cold weather with just a little care to keep them from hard freezes. In summer things can get a lot more varied. It’s close to the house, it’s easy to get to and keep, it’s a joy to tend, the food is your very own.

Next installment we’ll look at some well-planned porch, herb and kitchen gardens and what should be grown in them. Start looking around the place with your “future eyes,” and soon you’ll be picking strawberries instead of mowing the lawn!