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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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After briefly mentioning Barrelponics in Tuesday’s roundup, I wanted to take another opportunity to share my love for this humble, DIY aquaponics system. With a footprint of about 20 square feet, this is definitely the kind of thing that you can have on a back porch or patio, making it fair game for lots of rental and dense urban situations.

Here’s one of the better youtube videos of a system:

Does anyone get as excited as I do about these systems?!

The only one that I’ve gotten to poke and prod at in real life belongs to my friend Walker. He’s a pretty sharp guy, and has contributed a couple of his own novel ideas to the system:
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I wrote about this great mobile garden in a previous post.  Thought I’d update folks, as it was still winter at that point, and there wasn’t much life in it.  Now that it’s almost summer, this amazing raised-bed-on-wheels is bursting with scrumptious edibles, and I finally figured out what the hell was going on with the gravity-fed milk jug irrigation system.  It’s pretty clever!

Still waiting for someone to put a bike trailer hitch on one of these….

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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