Janet Combs asked:




Have you ever dreamed of harvesting your own fruit and vegetables, fresh from the garden? Have you ever baulked at rising produce prices, and spent an arm and a leg on fresh produce only to take it home and find it bland? Have you ever wished you had a spacious backyard to grow your own corn and strawberries, but gave up your dreams because you work in the city and live in an apartment?

What if I told you that you can harvest as much fresh fruit and vegetables as you’d like from your very own garden with only the space on your balcony or windowsills.
You might think it is a crazy idea right?

With today’s vertical gardening techniques, you can grow your own produce as long as you have somewhere sunny, be it a balcony, porch, or alleyway along a fence. With vertical gardening, you train your veggies to grow up, not out.

So what exactly is vertical gardening and why can it give you season after season of satisfaction and impressive crops of fruits and vegetables?

Vertical gardening relies on the fact that plants will grow where ever there is light, nutrients, and support. This means that even if your cucumber vine is growing from a pot straight up a wall, it will still produce!

Long ago, it was commonly thought that only with expansive amounts of land can one grow produce. The problem was that before the advent of pots, irrigation, and soil conditioners, each plant relied strictly on what was in the soil beneath it to survive.

This meant that a given plant would consume a large amount of soil in order to produce a given amount of fruit.

Today, we can engineer optimum conditions for a given plant in a milk jug, and watch it produce many pounds of vegetables. This is possible through the application of science and careful planning of your garden well before planting the first seed.

Do not be discouraged, although the process may seem labor intensive and difficult, it truly isn’t. After only a few weeks you will understand most of the theory and after a single season you will become a seasoned professional at growing your own produce indoors or in small spaces. Imagine covering an entire wall with bean vines, cucumbers, and tomatoes.

Imagine the satisfaction you will get when you bite into your very own produce, which will taste many fold better than that which is available at the store. This and much more is possible with vertical gardening!

So, if you have decided that vertical gardening may be something you would like more information about, scour the Internet for more info. You will be surprised at the resources available, and I am sure if you set your mind to it you could be harvesting your own fruit and veggies this year. Vertical gardening may be bringing fresh produce to a balcony near you soon.

Container Gardening

Gary Caine asked:




For those who don’t have the space for a traditional tomato garden an excellent alternative is to grow tomatoes in pots, allowing you to make use of your patio, balcony or you could even grow tomatoes indoors.

Some varieties of tomatoes are better suited to container gardening that than others. Sure you can grow any type of tomato, but some of the larger varieties will require huge pots and may not be feasible for for the space you have available.

Unless you have a lot of room it is usually best to select on of the smaller varieties. The Patio Tomato is especially designed for this purpose, but they aren’t your only choice. You can just as easily grow Roma, Tiny Tim, Cherry Tomatoes or any other variety that doesn’t take too much room.

You can buy potted tomato plants locally and they will be healthy and suited to the climate that you live in. On the other hand it’s less expensive to start them from seed and you may find that you’ve gained more satisfaction from going through the whole process of seeding to harvesting yourself.

The pot for your tomato plants should be at least 12 inches across and 12 or more inches deep with proper drainage holes in the bottom. Other than that you can whatever strikes your fancy. People use wooden whiskey barrels that have been cut in half, old wash tubs, 5 gallon pails and store bought planters. So just about anything goes.

One of the problems with a traditional garden is that you need to be careful not to introduce any soil born diseases into the garden. By growing tomatoes in a pot you all but eliminate any concern in this area. You can use any one of the potting soil mixes and your tomatoes will be fine and you can relax knowing that the soil didn’t come with any diseases hidden in it.

With a traditional garden it’s essential to plant your tomatoes where they will get sunlight all day. Your tomatoes are in pots, so if you don’t have one location that gets sunlight all day you can move them throughout the day to ensure they get enough light.

Overall growing tomatoes in pots is not much different than growing them in the garden. All you need to do is pay attention to watering, fertilizing and pruning your tomato plants.

Grow A Plant

Luvi Marie Corcuera asked:




It takes a lot of effort and indeed time to be successful in organic container vegetable gardening. To be successful you will need to know some important information on basic organic container vegetable gardening so that you will be able to properly set up you organic container vegetable garden in the right way and easily avoid problems.

Gardeners will have the chance to enjoy the wonderful taste of homegrown vegetables with organic container vegetable gardening and at the same time make it better for the environment, and this can be done even without having a large backyard. There are a variety of materials you can use to plant your vegetables such as old coffee cans, soda bottles or in fact any recycled container. These can quite easily be place on your window sills, balcony or porch.

Learn The Basics

Starting off your organic container vegetable gardening project will require you to get some vegetable seeds. Whilst seeds are available everywhere, you should ensure that you buy organics seeds and not just any seeds from the major stores which could be genetically modified, so that you will truly have a real organic garden.

You should also do your research by consulting your plant book or over the internet in order to be aware of when you should be planting your seeds. In a majority of cases the best place to start is indoors, however your should also ensure that your plants are provided with enough sunlight, around 5 hours a day of exposure would be beneficial. For your fertilizing needs, get yourself some slow-release organic fertilizer so that you plants will be nourished throughout the growing season. In organic container vegetable gardening, soil can be used but better results can be achieved with a vermiculite-based or peat mix. keep in mind that plants in pots need to be watered more frequently compared to plants ground in the ground, and remember that as your plants grow bigger, their water requirements will also increase so you have to check on them more as this happens.

What makes organic container vegetable gardening uniquely beautiful is that you will be able to grow them in just about any home. It does take a lot of time and effort to successfully practice container gardening but it gets much easier and is certainly more convenient than the normal practice of gardening on a plot in your yard. Starting off can also be quite inexpensive since the main requirement is to have suitable containers and a good soil mix, and we all know you can reuse old items for the containers.

For your organic container vegetable garden you will have a variety of vegetables to choose from which you can plant. Some of the more popular that you can start off with are cucumbers, eggplants, tomatoes, chard and radish, to name just a few. You can try others too and as a matter of fact pretty much any vegetable can easily be grown in containers. Some may be a little more challenging to grow like corn and potatoes, but it certainly is not impossible. If you do like gardening challenges then you can even plant “dwarf” or bush “varieties” of regular crops such as different tomato varieties or small cucumbers that have been bred to grow in a small-space garden.

To conclude, growing your own organic vegetables whether it’s to save money, better nutrition or both, the choice of organic container vegetable gardening [http://www.gardengrowth.com/category/gardening/vegetable-gardening] is most certainly an excellent choice. It is easy to do and of course inexpensive, which gives you no excuses even if you don’t have a single plot of land for planting.

Rose Maven

Connie Bednar asked:




You can now combine your love of drinking tea and gardening! Yes, you can grow real tea plants from the Camellia sinensis plant. Imagine growing and serving tea that you grew in your own garden!

This is an absolutely beautiful and highly ornamental plant that would compliment any garden. Although the tea plant can grow to tree over 30 feet tall, when pruned, it makes a great spreading bush that will grow to 2-5 feet tall. A tea Gardner prefers to keep the plant at a size that is easy for plucking the tender blooms to make tea. In fact pruning and removing the more mature leaves allows you tea plant to have stronger new growth.

It is not difficult to grow the Camellia sinensis plant. The areas for growing are zoned, so if you live in the Zones 7 to 9 you can grow your tea plants outdoors in your garden.

Don’t be discouraged if you live outside of the zone, because this hardy green tea plant does very well in a container or in a green house.

A lot of space is not required to grow your very own tea, so a small porch or even a balcony will do just fine. In fact, some prefer to grow their Camellia sinensis teaplant in a potted container that they can bring in to protect it from the cold. In fact, because the plant thrives in a well drained and acidic soil many prefer to use a container as they find it easier to maintain the acidity of the soil.

The beauty of the Camellia sinensis plants are the beautiful small white blossoms that bloom in the fall. They have an absolutely intoxicating and delightful scent. The leaves have a leathery oval shaped appearance and produces seeds the size of a marble.

More on how to become a tea Gardner and grow your own tea plants

There are several ways to plant your Camellia sinensis. You can purchase tea plants from a nursery or purchase the seeds and start from scratch. The marble size seeds have an outer shell. Some chose to crack open that outer shell before planting the seed. Other gardeners completely remove the outer shell. This is the choice of most gardeners. It is important that if you remove the outer shell of the tea seed, that the soil is well drained. Tea embryos will rot in the early stages if the soil is too damp

The Camellia sinensis plant prefers to have daytime temperatures around 70 degrees and temperatures in the high 50 degree range at night time.

It takes approximately 3 – 4 years before you will be able to harvest you first batch of brewed tea. Nurturing and patience are required of the individual that wants to grow their own tea plants.

Your tea plant will be ready to harvest when the buds and leaves on your plants develop 3 sets of leaves on a branch. Good quality tea is only made from the first 3 leaves and bud of the plant. This is a process know as fine plucking. The lower leaves are known to brew a lower quality of tea.

How much tea does one tea plant produce? The average plant produces about three thousand tea leaves a year. This is equivalent to approximately one pound of processed and dried tea.

Did you know that white tea, green tea, black and oolong tea all come from the same tea bush? Yes, they do! It is the processing and oxidation process that each tea goes through that creates its own distinct flavor.

The next step to becoming a tea Gardner is learning to harvest your tea plants. There can be no better cup of tea than one you brew from your own garden.

Mini Garden