I just moved into a town home and am planning a garden. I’ve never grown anything but a spider plant before, but am looking forward to giving it a shot. We don’t actually own any (dirt)land so I’m in the middle of building two 4’ X 4’ raised gardening boxes to place on our concrete porch. As my plans stand now both boxes will provide my garden 4’ by 4’ each both with a depth of 1 foot. I plan to use one part peat to 2 parts planting soil on top of a thin bed of gravel. The boxes are elevated with holes in the bottom for drainage. I’m planning 2 ‘Delicious’ tomato plants and ‘danver’ carrots in one, 3 ‘Allsweet’ watermelons and strawberries in the other. Two weeks ago I started a surplus of them in baby planter containers and they’re coming along terrifically, I don’t think it’s going to frost again here in central Wisconsin so I’m planning on having them transplanted in a week. Anyway, my questions:
I plan on building a wooden frame on the side of one of the boxes for the tomatoes to climb, but I have no idea how high to make it, how high should it be?
The bag of ‘June Bearing Strawberries All Star’ are starting to sprout, but my mom said not to expect berries from them this year, I want produce this year, are they a lost cause?
Is 1 foot deep enough? It wouldn’t be too difficult to make it deeper, but in the interests of space, structural integrity and my boxes aesthetics would prefer not to do it.
Indeterminate tomatoes will go as high as they’ve got support, so let aesthetics be your guide. You probably don’t want anything higher than you can reach comfortably.
Strawberries are perennial, so you need to take the long view on them. You may get a few berries this year, but the harvest will be better next year and going forward.
Planting carrots, lettuce, and other cold weather crops now should be fine, but you’re about a month early – at least – for tomatoes, peppers, and other tender plants, unless you’re planning to provide protection (row covers, cloches, etc.).
In central Wisconsin you still have about a month of likely to freeze weather. Do not plant tomatoes or watermelon outside yet. For your location think of Mothers Day as the time to plant peppers, tomatoes and watermelon safely outside. You can chance frost killing them if you are willing to start over for the chance to get earlier crops in a lucky year. I’m in Portage so I know when you can plant in central Wisconsin.
You should plant your strawberries now. Though they will produce some flowers and fruit, you should pinch out the flower clusters to get large healthy plants for next year, and you need to direct the runners to establish new plants from them. June bearing strawberries are normally grown in a cycle of three years, and then disposed of. I won’t get into details. There are sites on how to grow them.
You can try the carrots now, but I would suggest waiting until May for those. The thing with carrots is to be sure there is loose soil without stones to the depth they grow. Danvers will be fine in a one foot deep bed. You may wish to try a couple varieties because they all taste different. Try some Scarlet Nanties for a shorter smaller variety. there are also some super sweet varieties that I would recommend you get. Remember to thin the carrots to a spacing wider than the carrots grow, or they will be stunted and twisted around each other. I would plant carrots by seeding over a couple square feet of area and not in a single row. Look up square foot gardening to get an ideal of what I’m talking about. Also look at intensive gardening for people with little space to garden.
I will jump on my usual soapbox about tomatoes and peppers. They DO NOT like cold soil. The frost-free date may be around Mother’s Day, but the soil will not be warm by then (unless you put down black plastic mulch), and your tomatoes and peppers will sit in that cold soil and shiver with resentment.
Wait until Memorial Day. The tomatoes and peppers will be much happier.
If you’re itching to get things planted early, plant lettuce. Buy a bunch of different loose-leaf kinds of lettuce, mix the seeds together and broadcast the seed over part of your bed. When the leaves are about the size of gourmet baby lettuce that you pay an arm and a leg for at the grocery store, take a pair of scissors and cut a bunch of leaves. Keep the plants watered and fed and they will sprout new leaves. You can keep cutting lettuce until it bolts when it gets too warm.
One thing about using raised beds is they warm up faster than the ground level soil. The fact they are on concrete slabs will increase their heat levels too. Though the tomatoes need warmer soil, the raised beds will help too cut off a week or two on her waiting period. Tomatoes don’t need a freeze to croak off that’s for sure. Planting tomato seed directly in the soil will often out produce a plant started indoors a month earlier. The plants may grow to the same size, but the fruit can be less on a plant that had less then perfect conditions started indoors.
Well, if she’s planning to spread all the vines out onto the porch and not having very many strawberry plants, and is willing to do a lot of extra watering because they won’t be able to put down extra roots from the vines, I think it could be done. I think it’ll be a right pain in the arse, though.
Sitnam, if you really, really want strawberries this year, you’ll need to buy some transplants–plants that are already sprouted out and established in little peat pots.
I figure the vines will be on the concrete, if she plans that or not. I don’t waste space on melons in Wisconsin, because the vines freeze before you get much if any melons from them. You can get some melons if you try hard, and get lucky.
I’m trying something similar with two 2’x4’ boxes, but we’re in the Twin Cities so even further north. We’re going to plant a tomato (around Memorial Day), some spinach or leaf lettuce, basil, cilantro, maybe chives, and I don’t know what else.
What other veggies are easy to grow and would grow well in a box/raised bed in our short growing season?
1 - Dont be afraid to fail. You may feel bad killing something that was once alive - but there are seeds to replace that plant. That is what seeds are for. Sounds obvious - but I’m still hesitant to toss out plants that are doomed to failure but not quite there yet.
2 - If interested in growing from seed - nothing wrong with getting a small seed starter kit (really anything covered that can hold a small amount of soil) with a warming mat and experimenting indoors. You may not get them out early enough for a crop this year (tomato’s, for example, require a long growing period) - but by the time next year comes around when it is time to be serious - you can already have gone through a couple ‘experiments’ (how much light, how much water, how much food/compost/fertilizer/whatever) on getting the seeds to grow nicely.
I love Square Foot Gardening for gardening in small spaces. I see he has an updated version, too. All New Square Foot Gardening We’ve raised flowers and vegetables in raised beds for years and love it love it love it.
The love of gardening is not only the produce but the journey to that first frost in the fall. It’s a labor of love to battle the slugs, bugs, weeds, and weather.
The best advice I can give is just enjoy the journey!
You can plant nasturtium which is a beautiful edible flower. The plant has a black peppery taste. A bush cucumber will only get a couple feet long and produce a lot of cucumbers over the season for a single plant. I used to have a wall that was about 2 and a half feet tall and I grew bush cucumbers over the side. They hung down and grew nice clean fruit. The garden space taken by them was the first 6 inches of soil against the top of the wall. I plant nasturtium in every hill of squash or cucumber I plant as a cover for the stem near the root. it helps to disguise the area that squash bores go for.
One important thing is to plant multiple varieties if you can. Even when you only have two plants try to use different varieties if you can. Disease and pests often will ignore one variety when they kill another. Different varieties will respond differently to the particular weather that year so it’s a hedge against weather too.