Once all the palm and fig rubbish has gone from our backyard, I'm going to start growing some things in pots. I bought this book with some birthday money. Although it's about gardening on a high-rise balcony, there are some good ideas that I hope might work in our limited-space scenario here. And we do have a front deck that gets a lot of northern sun so I am hoping to put some pots on there without too much loss of space.
We already have rosemary and parsley growing. Our rosemary is outgrowing the space we'd allocated for it, is taking over the rest of the garden bed and needs a good prune when it finishes flowering. I keep thinking I'll take some to church and share it around but I keep forgetting to do that. The parsley is in a pot with some poor little strawberry plants. The parsley decided to take over the pot so the strawberries are struggling and I think they may give up soon (lesson learned re overplanting...).
I'm planning to add pots of tomatoes, radishes, mint and lavender to this. I think I'll put the lavender on the deck so the afternoon breezes might blow the scent inside. The other things will go out the back. I'll need to find a suitably shady and damp spot for the mint.
All this sounds very good in theory. In practice, I'm quite good at buying the seedlings, planting them out and watering and fertilizing them for the first week or two. Ongoing maintenance after that is a bit hit and miss. We're lucky it rains a lot here. I think I'd probably get better results if I added fertilizer to the soil more often. Plants that don't need much kindness and attention tend to fare much better at our house.
So I'll see how it goes. The first step is getting to the nursery with all four kids in tow. It's already sounding difficult. I may have to leave it until school goes back...
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