The Modern Victory Garden

I have a quite a few good sized garden beds available to me for planting up my garden, but I invariably use a lot of container plantings to augment the traditional garden crops.   Containers allow me to plant extra plants I have that would otherwise end up on the compost pile, they allow me to use some small areas in the garden that get good sun but are not good candidates for a regular raised bed to be installed, and containers can be kept in the greenhouse until the weather really gets warm before moving outside and can be again brought inside in the fall to extend the crop’s harvest.   Lots of reasons to use containers for planting vegetables and berries even if you have a large garden area available to you.                                   

I use some containers for more permanent plantings – such as my pots of herbs.   This is some chives that I recently replanted, French thyme, and my cat’s personal pot of catnip (yes he is spoiled!).                                   

I also have several large containers on our side deck that are planted in blueberries.   These plants have really gotten big this year and are loaded with blooms and small berries.   I need to get some netting over them soon if I want to keep some of the future harvest from the birds.                             

The deck is a great spot to grow things on my property as it gets good sun exposure and would represents a colossal waste of space if it did not serve more than the one purpose of providing us a place to sit and commune with nature every once in a great while.   Right next to the blueberries is my rectangular pot of Merlot lettuces.   They don’t look very photogenic at the moment because we have been continuing to harvest from them for many weeks and I cut a bunch of it as recently as yesterday.                        

Just a bit further along where the deck wraps around to the back of the house, I have four containers of Sweet Italian peppers growing in medium/large pots.   It has not been a good year for peppers and basil because of the constant wet and cool conditions, but these container planted peppers are holding their own despite that.                                            

Tucked into a sunny corner of the garden are four containers of super early started Siletz tomatoes.   They were in the greenhouse for a very long time before I finally moved them out of doors.                                    

Inside the greenhouse I have five more containers of tomatoes growing – all of them Celebrity.   Celebrity is a robust semi determinate tomato that reliably produces a nice mid to late season tomato but needs the extra season extension of the greenhouse to ensure fruit maturity in our climate.   They always grow a huge main stem that is reminiscent of a tree trunk.              

Not exactly crops in pots, but the chinese cabbages, broccoli, swiss chard, and kale that I started about a week and a half ago are all up and growing well.   I moved them out of the greenhouse today to let them soak up some sunshine (briefly while it was here!).                                                      

Growing crops in pots is a great way to add greater variety to your harvest options and allows you to maximize available growing areas that would otherwise be underutilized.   Do you grow vegetables or fruits in pots?