No, not that kind of pot, you burnout. I started a container garden in a spare bit of land on my landlord’s very well planted and maintained property. Last year, when I’d first moved in, I was bit too preoccupied with other things to really develop it much. For instance, I took home some of the potted long-life roses that a friend gave out at her wedding and never got around to planting them in time. Prophetically, they died.
But this year I laid out the cash for some big pots and made the time to plant stuff in them. So the vegetables didn’t really get in the ground until after July 4; at least they got in the ground. Considering how I was doing seven months earlier, that’s not so bad.
The perennial sunflowers had already come and gone by the time I got around to taking these photos, but you can still see my own little corner of abundance.
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Buddha has been with me since Cambridge, as has the pot of herbs beside him (I did have to replant most of the pot this spring, though). Behind but not really visible is a zinc tub of pansies which lasted all the way from the days of the late spring snowfall. Turns out pansies are edible — who knew? Those stalks in the back are the bottoms of my perennial sunflowers, given to me by Helen Snively, patron goddess of Cambridge community garden and tender of the Sacramento Street plot that contains poppies planted by Abbie Hoffman’s wife. They grow wonderfully high and require almost no maintenance aside from watering in the hot months. |
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I’m hoping the basil will actually go to seed before the frost and come back next year, but knowing my luck with basil it probably won’t. This is too woody and large for the sort of tender, sweet basil flavor you get with the smaller plants. But I love having this fragrant herb in my garden regardless. In back are some ornamental chives given me by some friends in Medford. I arrived one day to pick up a bowl I’d left at a potluck and came away with a summer’s supply of oregano, fresh-cut snapdragons, and ornamental chives with their roots and dirt in a plastic bag. I love fellow gardeners. |
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I’ve learned the hard way that container gardening requires a lot more soil than you think it might. My plot in the Sacramento Street Community Garden really spoiled me; 30 years of soil-enrichment and organic gardening meant that things grew like gangbusters. This time, I was relying on some bags of dirt from Home Depot. Still, I did pretty well. Those peppermint in the foreground have followed me through at least two moves. The pot on the left has a sweet potato (did you know you can eat the leaves? You steam them and they taste like spinach, only sweeter), and cucumbers and tomatoes that will probably not bear this year. Behind are the three sisters: corn, beans, and squash. I think the corn may be a bit fungal, and Grandmother Spider spun some little spider condos in the back corner of the pot. But the beanstalks bore a decent amount, and the acorn squash may have something for me before Samhain. |
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The beanstalks grew into the wisteria behind and the low-hanging branches of a nearby tree. |
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My camera is the best the Palm Treo 600x has to offer, so you may not be able to see that one small pea flower nestled in the leaves. But I did, and it made me happy. |
