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23/5/08
18:12
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67 bags you can fit along your paths? It’s amazing how quickly they stop looking like bags and start looking like growing plants. If you are too garden-proud, then why not line your paths with grow-bags? Flat they will grow potatoes, outdoor tomatoes, courgettes, and cucumbers. But who says you have to open them flat? If you stand them on their edge, leaning against something for support, you can grow a brilliant crop of carrots in them. Of course, there is nothing to stop you growing vegetables in pots, and you will get some brilliant surprises too. Cabbages in pots go to seed easily, and A very old friend in a huge pot – notice the last of the do not grow like cabbages. As tall as me, bluebell leaves hanging over the side. my cabs are still cabbages, still edible as greens, and they just happen to look There is nothing to stop you having a good on the patio. The same goes for series of containers fixed to the wall that caulis and broccoli. you plant up. Walls are brilliant for You can grow peas and beans in 30cm growing. They provide shelter, heat stored from the day’s sunshine and water, pots quite easily. Simply sow two beans per pot. Even now isn’t too although you do need to late. You can also sow 4 peas water your boxes. It is no in a 30cm pot and give mistake that weeds grow YOU CAN them some support. They most where the wall and grow just as well as in a floor meet. GROW PEAS will field, and produce a crop. If Don’t forget the AND BEANS you have room for ten pots, swinging window box that you probably have as many is otherwise known as a IN 30CM pea plants as you get on hanging basket. Personally I wouldn’t like to keep a POTS QUITE most allotments. If you go to the garden centre you can hanging basket ten stories EASILY buy these plants already up, the do an awful lot of growing – just transplant damage when they fall! them.
Don’t miss a space, these are baby carrots growing in concrete hollow blocks.
producing one meal, so I have dozens of pots around the patio. If I needed to I would have pots growing on the shed, on the drive, on the roof and even outside in the street! I suppose my ordinary semidetached house in urban Manchester has room for over a thousand 30cm pots, so there is plenty of scope for expansion.
GUERILLA FARMING
A patio is the posh way of describing a wide path. Areas from paths to patios present perfect growing opportunities. Take advantage of paths by lining them on either side with bags of compost in which you grow food. This is an ideal way of using up a few plastic shopping bags. Push a few inside the other and then fill with compost and grow a potato in each bag. It will need feeding and watering for sure, but each bag will give a family a meal, and you can start now. Don’t worry about planting times! I wonder how many
HEALTHY
It is easy to plan the number of meals you will get – I try to aim for a pot
This is the view from my front window: a large factory with a lorry park that is full of wooden pallets piled high. The lorries that are there are rotting away and the pallets are crying out to be made into containers. Then there is some wasteland next to it, and then a canal. Without anyone bothering about them too much I have grown bags of potatoes by the lorry park, and jolly nice they were too! I used carrier bags and once the potatoes had grown through the top I taped them up to stop cats doing what cats do on them. Every now and again I poured a bottle of feed and water into them. Now I am not advocating breaking the law. The factory owners knew what I was doing because I had asked. But if you look around, and are prepared to look a bit country-bumpkinish, there are plenty of places where you can grow lots of food. E
You need something pretty anyway!
Cabbages grow different in pots and look good!
Cauli’s in flower on my patio.
GOING POTTY
In pots there is no clubroot and no longterm soil borne diseases. It is easier to control slugs and snails and you can move your plants according to your needs. You can bring them indoors if it is frosty, cover them up, take them to the greenhouse, or just move them around because you’re fed up with looking at them!
PLANNING