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Have you tried googling “fire escape garden”?! There are a bajillion articles about container gardening on fire escapes.  Who knew?!

Anyhow, most of them absolutely suck (WHY did TLC, eHow, and Emeril have to jump on the urban farming bandwagon?!), so I’ve saved you some disappointment by picking out a few of the highlights.  Unsurprisingly, Manhattan and Brooklyn are leading the way…

• A packed 2′x3′ fire escape garden in NYC, complete with self-watering containers and upcycled soda bottle planters.
• Interesting conjecture about the legality of fire escape gardening, with an interesting tip to keep pigeons and squirrels out of your veggies.
• Not a post, but it’s notable that there is a EFFING STORE IN SAN FRANCISCO CALLED FIRE ESCAPE FARMS!!!  What?!  They sell lots of unecessarily-expensive-but-very-amusing stuff for the urban gardener.
• For some beautiful photos of fire escape gardening (but relatively little text), check out thefireescapegarden.com’s 2009 archive (apparently, in 2010 they moved the burbs…)

(Photo credit: Flickr user Kristine Paulus.)

A few years ago, my friend Laura Altvater (of Mostly Medicinals) put together this great edible container handout for Portland Nursery.  It has some really imaginative themed combinations, as well as a container idea for a shady situation, and one for hot and dry.

I’ve had this lying around for a while, not wanting to toss it, but not knowing quite what to do with it either.  So yesterday I decided to scan it and put it out as an inspirational morsel for folks who are gearing up for Spring planting.  Click the images below, or download it as a .pdf (1.5 mb) here.  Check out another great post about mixed containers here.

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Polyculture in a Bucket: Goji berry, kale, onions, strawberry, and foxglove.

Food forestry (a.k.a. forest gardening) is a concept that people seem to become enthralled with when they hear about it: a way of gardening that mimics the diversity and resilience of a healthy forest, and provides an abundance of fruits, nuts, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and more.

You’d have to be a baby-eating robot not the like the sound of that!

But forests are big, and balconies are small.  So how to adapt this wonderful idea to the apartment-scale? All it takes is a basic understanding of how food forests are put together.
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Getting this one out a little late today. I generally try to get posts done the night before and scheduled to go up in the middle of the night, but I was up for a while last night putting up the third installment of the greywater series.

Just in time for lunch, a few tasty morsels:

Project Thoreau

In my ongoing (and generally successful) quest to distract myself from the things I really need to get done, I read most of what comes out of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia’s blog. Over the past year or so, I’ve been enthused by the intermittent updates from a renter permaculturist (I need a single word for that: renterculturist? permarenter? arrgh!) in Australia working on a little thing she’s calling Project Thoreau. The updates, which include birds-eye-view photos of a tiny back patio and yard, show her progress over the last 2+ years of experimentation, and offer an inspiring model for what can be done in minimal space.

[photo: permaculture.org.au]
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(For previous talk about container gardening, check this out.)

I keep having a lot of random thoughts and links that I want to get out to y’all, and not the time to develop each into a post of its own.  So here’s another batch or snacks for your brain…

Links

Life on the Balcony, a beginner container gardener’s wet dream, just finished a blog carnival about edible containers. Lots of good reading there. Check the rest of the site for more container gardening information than you could ever assimilate.

I find a lot of stuff on this site (aesthetically) boring, but it has a huge range of ideas. Check it out if you’re needing inspiration around different materials to make containers out of.

The ever-informative about.com has a section devoted to container gardening that I didn’t come across until just recently. Suprisingly extensive.

Books

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Fresh Food from Small Spaces by RJ Rupenthal, and Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler. Both are superb books for tenant farmers, and while container gardening is a core focus of each, they explore other interesting topics as well.

Places to find great containers for the 2010 season:

For a lot of us in the northern hemisphere, right now is the time to be gearing up for planting, which means get your containers ready!  If you need cheap containers to re-purpose or upcycle, check out these places:

• Yardsales
• Estate sales
• Flea markets
• Thriftstores
• End-of-Season sales at nurseries (varies by region, generally November here in the Pacific NW)

There you go for now.  Happy gardening!

-LB

[image source: ...eeek! can't remember]

Wow! Jumping back into the saddle after months without a murmur here.  Life has been busy with some notable projects, a vision plan for the Pacific University Center for Sustainability Education and a community food garden at Nike’s international headquarters.

There are a few lose threads hanging around here, so I thought I’d immediately jump on one.  As promised back in May (eek!),  here are some resources for highly-aesthetic container gardens, when scrappy-looking ones using random materials just won’t do.  If you’re looking for introductory information, here is a post from a while back with great links.
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It feels like I have a new favorite guerilla-planting every week, and this week, it’s this amazing stenciled utility sink planter on the corner of SE 25th and Ivon in Portland. File under f’n awesome.

This one gets major points for the following reasons:

• Displays polycultural planting in a small space, with tomato, beans, lettuce, basil. (That said, it’s probably planted a little too densely, with one tomato and one bean plant too many.)
• Upcycles an old utiliy sink.
• Water that drains out of the sink flows into another planter below the sink planted with lettuces, which thrive in the shady microclimate underneath.
• Great signage (“Respect Our Local Food” & “Niche Repurposing Public Space”)
• Beautiful stenciling.
• Placement directly on the corner demands attention, but it’s still out of the way enough for pedestrians to navigate around.

A reader recently requested a post with more resources for container gardening, specifically, types of containers to use, and where to get them.  I’m going to split it up into two installments: this post will discuss upcycled container ideas when visual aesthetics aren’t so much an issue, and I’ll follow up next week with one looking at containers to use when they’ll be subject to a more discerning eyes. (That follow-up post here.)

Here are some of my favorite things to use for container gardens when a rough, upcycled aesthetic is OK:

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It’s been slow on the posting front, as I’ve gotten addicted to Twitter (follow me!).  I’ve been coming across a lot of great container gardening-related resources, and thought I’d throw up a quick list of a few:

Vegetables

• Great list of specific vegetable varieties well-suited to container growing.
• This page has a good chart (scroll to bottom) showing the minimum container sizes for various vegetables.
• Lifehacker’s post about self-watering tomato planters.

Fruits

• Basic tips for growing fruit in pots.
• An article specifically about apples.
• A pdf all about growing blueberries in containers.
• From the Royal Horticultural Society, a great list of fruit varieties suitable for container growing.

For all troubleshooting related to container gardening, post questions to the forum at GardenWeb.

Finally, if you like the tactile experience of a book, pick up a copy of McGee and Stuckey’s Edible Container, an encyclopedic work on the subject.

Have fun!