The Tropical Gardener

I’m a novice gardener and I’m interested in starting a vegetable garden next year, but would need to do it in containers. Do you have any book recommendations for container gardening? I’m also looking for suggestions on how to get started and what would be easy to grow in containers. Thanks!

Lowe’s sells a great book on container gardening published by Sunset and that is how I got started. Although now I live on about an acre, I started gardening in containers on an enclosed condo patio. I still have over 200 plants growing in containers in my yard, including herbs, citrus and veggies. Tomatoes, peppers and herbs are great to grow in containers. I grow 5 different varieties of tomatoes, 3 pepper varieties and a host of herbs like thyme, sage, chives, basil, 2 kinds of oregano, tarragon, dill, mint, chamomile…and some others I don’t remember right now. I found growing vine plants like cucumber, pumpkin and squash is a little tricky in containers, but they do show you how in the Sunset book. For free advice on gardening in containers in your zone, you can contact a master gardener or the county agricultural extension.

I’m looking for a gardening forum that has many people and provides quick answers. I mainly garden fruits, vegetables and tropical plants.

Garden Web…. they’ve got forums for everything and the advice from their ‘regular’ folks is pretty darned good!…

http://www.gardenweb.com/

clik on ‘gardenweb forums’ to get started….

dear all,
i have a garden which i will start from nothing. i was wondering if anyone could share the photo of their garden (plants and decoration) to give me some idea. i’m living in a hot summer tropical country, trying to make it looks like western cozy kind of garden. usually pictures from gardening magazine only show part of the garden. or perhaps any URL ?
thanks.

Try these, they may have what you’re looking for.

http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&hl=en&lr=&q=Western++garden&btnG=Search

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&lr=&q=Western%20style%20garden&sa=N&tab=wi

I saw something about it on tv the other day and have read a little about it before.

Does anyone have any experience, does it make a difference or is it coincidence?

From my own experience, I find most things are reluctant to grow after June, when the days start getting shorter. I’ve never tried gardening by moon phases, I tend to go by the phases of the sun rather than the moon, but thought of trying it out this year just for fun.

I tried it a few years back – but you really do have to be quite methodical about it!
My main problem with it was that it wanted me to sow/grow/harvest etc. at times I wasn’t ready to!
The idea is that you should expect bigger & better, pest free crops if whatever you grow.
My mum also did it a few years back, she is retired and was able to fit her schedule around the suggested times etc. more easily than I could and she reckoned she did see a difference – not sure if that was just wishful thinking though!

I have read many articles that suggest using old tires for container gardening. My father is considering making a vegetable garden out of tires. Does the tire pollute the soil and there fore the vegetables? I it is bad to burn tires.. Should I be concerned about the quality of the vegetables? Have you seen any scientific evidence about this topic? Or environmental tests?

If you already have the tires – I say use ‘em. Don’t burn them, however. I can’t imagine there is any concern about the quality of the veggies since what that really depends on is the soil you put them in and how you fertilize etc. They make rubber mulch these days – probably from old tires…

One critter warning – if you are not going to turn the tires inside out to eliminate the ridges, or if you are going to "store" tires, I would give you a caveat about mosquitoes who LOVE to breed in the little bit of water that usually sits in those ridges. Make sure the tires are packed tight with soil.

If you don’t have tires already, I don’t see an advantage to this method over any other raised bed method.

There are lots of unanswered questions that would help determine what the best garden situation is for you :

Do you want raised beds because you have trouble up and down? If that is the case, build a box (make the bottom out of screening and landscape fabric so water will flow through) and set it on top of some table legs or horses.

Or is it because you only have a little bit of space? Container gardening is easily done with vegetables. See the book Movable Harvest for really great ideas. You can use pretty much anything you can put a drainage hole in (provided it didn’t have chemicals in it first!).

Personally, I think anytime you are recycling something for a good use it is worthwhile – but for the love of God – PLEASE don’t buy new tires to try this project out!

Just in case you DO have a bunch of tires laying around, I attached a link to a site that has many ideas for using them up in the garden.

Good luck to you and your dad!