Gardening without a Garden

May 24th, 2011

   Don’t let a minor setback like no soil and no space stop you from gardening.

Getting ready to assemble Erin's alley garden.

   Where there’s a will, there’s a way to grow a few cucumbers and an herb or two or three.

   Our daughter, Erin, lives in Baltimore in a tightly packed urban neighborhood with postage-stamp yards and a lot of asphalt and concrete.

   Actually, she lives kind of under a 2-story house in a basement apartment that opens directly into an alley.

   Erin mentioned one day that she wished she had a little garden or at least a few containers where she could grow a tomato plant, some fresh herbs, some of those extra-long cucumbers that go for more than $1 each at the grocery and maybe a few flowers.

   So for her birthday last month, Sue and I delivered. After all, we can’t let a budding gardener not bud.

   What we came up with was a series of square, 15-inch plastic pots, all lined up along her house wall and contained by a wooden planter box.

The finished product.

   Sue painted the box an earthy red. It looks like one continuous raised-bed planter, even though it’s really just a bunch of pots sitting on asphalt, hidden by the box.

   It only extends 18 inches out from the wall, so it doesn’t eat much into the alley space – certainly no more than the trash cans people sit out.

   The trim strip across the top serves two purposes. One is to give a nice finishing touch to the box. The other real reason is to discourage people from pulling out the pots and vandalizing them.

   I mounted three lattice panels on the wall to give the climbing crops something to grab onto.

   So far, so good.

   This alley gets some nice afternoon sun. And Erin and the two little neighbor girls are keeping everything watered with the pink plastic-pig watering can we bought as a classy garden accessory.

   It’s amazing how much stuff we’ve managed to cram into this 16-foot-long line of pots.

   There’s a cherry tomato, an ‘Early Girl’ tomato, several ‘Orient Express’ cukes, a half dozen kinds of herbs, a couple of peppers and eggplants, a dozen leeks, a few marigolds and petunias for color, and a ton of lettuce, spinach, mesclun and assorted salad greens.

   Erin is harvesting some of it already.

   Something else sprouted along with the plants.

   Neighbors came out of the woodwork to compliment Erin on her new garden. She met more new folks the first day the garden went in than she did the whole year she’s been living there.

   Most of them said how much nicer it is to look at flowers and veggies growing in the alley than the previously weed-infested rat haven.

   Speaking of rats, a couple of the garden-savvy neighbors warned that the New York City-sized alley rats are likely to be the biggest challenge. Seems that they eat most any vegetable.

   And I thought dealing with the groundhogs was bad.