Quick, Easy, and Portable Vegetable Garden

A collection of pots, just waiting to be planted in!

This spring I was very late to plan my garden and starting work on it. Fortunately, I knew that my schedule through the winter and spring would be tight, and I had been scheming in my head how to grow some vegetable this summer with the time I had.

Moreover, I did not want to dig up the yard and preferred something that was semi-portable. The property next to ours is slated for development, but the best sun is right on the property line. I wanted to do a garden that would allow me to move my vegetables a titch if need be.

Those two factors: 1) tightness of time; and, 2) uncertainty of placement of the garden, led me to consider a quick and portable way to get some seeds in the ground. An article in Mother Earth News gave me some ideas and a rotation plan that has been helpful.

Enter container gardening and dirt bag gardening.



I've been collecting planting pots for a while. Most of them were free. I had planted in the pots in years past, and dumped out the dirt in them this past winter. I removed a

Underneath this suspicious looking sheet of black plastic is two year old potting soil, now warming in the sun and ready to be mixed with compost and fertilizer for another term of service growing stuff.

s many roots as i could from the dirt, through in some composted grass clippings, and covered the dirt pile with black plastic to give the dirt something of a reset. I wanted to kill whatever weed seeds were in the dirt, and I also wanted to insulate and heat the dirt as much as possible to speed the germination of
my seeds in the spring. With the warm winter and spring we've had in Seattle, this strategy worked like a charm and the dirt was warm, nutrient rich, and ready to go when I had the chance to plant.

I used compost to refresh the potting soil.

 I mixed my own compost with bagged stuff from the store to give some balance to the nutrients.

All in all, I think I spent less than a full day getting my garden ready. It is pretty small, so that's to be expected, I guess. I was able to do it in increments as I had time:

• One afternoon (May 2) I spent an hour or so shoveling dirt into the pots, mixing with compost and fertilizer, and arranging the pots according to sun exposure and watering needs.
• A few days later (May 4) I planted seeds, and tomato and summer squash starts.
• A week or so later I spent an hour or so putting in some drip and sprinkler lines.

I planted veggies that I have some experience with and that have worked out for me in the past. This year I planted:

• Eight tomato varieties
• Two potato varieties
• Lettuce
• Rhubarb Ruby Chard
• Russian Kale
• Bush Beans
• Yellow Squash
• "Black Beauty" Zucchini
• Two Carrot varieties
• Once I eat the lettuce, I am going to rotate those to spinach

As I mentioned earlier, I organized the pots and dirt bags according to the amount of light they need and watering needs. Since I am using a programmable waterer - and so all the veggies get watered at the same time - I can adjust the flow on each drip head and sprinkler for the needs of the plants within reach.

Here is the layout:

 This is how I've arranged the pots and dirt bags before I planted anything. I have since made some minor rearrangements, which is a nice option to have.

As you can see, the dirt bags are literally bags of potting soil laid out with a rectangular window cut in the top of the bag. I made some incisions on the bottoms of the bags, too, so that there would be good drainage. Dirt bag gardens are great if you are not sure about the quality of your soil, need something quick and easy, or need some portability. It works great for lettuce and shallow rooted veggies. Laying the bags flat like that would not work well for something large like tomatoes or something deep like carrots.

Since I had extra tomato plants this year, I planted some in big containers, and others I planted in a dirt bag standing up. I cut off the top of the dirtbag, leaving some overlap to reduce moisture evaporation, which basically has served as a mulch. I strapped the bag to an arbor in my yard and, again, made some incisions in the bottom for drainage. Tomatoes need a lot of water, but they also need good drainage. With the bags standing up like this, the soil has been kept really warm and the tomatoes have thrived. 

This is just a picture of the same setup on the other side of the arbor.

 
 And here are some of the tomato starts in their pots. You can't tell from the pictures, but these are BIG pots. The green one on the right is the smallest of the three and really only suitable for cherry tomatoes, as I have done. I mostly stick with determinate tomatoes in pots, which means they grow to a predetermined size and then fruit all at one. Indeterminate tomatoes grow, grow, grow and produce over the season. I have indeterminate tomatoes in the vertical dirt bags with cages and I will be adding some string or twine for the tomatoes to climb up to the arbor.

Progress

I've already started harvesting some of the lettuce and chard.  The lettuce has been about a week and
a half ahead of schedule. Below is a picture of last night's salad just picked from the garden. The white stuff is Diatomaceous earth, a natural way to control slugs and pests without posing any danger to wildlife or humans. It rinses right off and is harmless.

At least three of my tomato plants already have fruit on them, some of it good size. The potatoes are almost ready to flower, which seems early to me. Since I was so late in getting everything going, the seed potatoes had been pretty well picked over at the garden center. What was left were old, wrinkly, sprouting seeds, but they have done very well so far.

I was worried that the late start would hinder the garden, instead it has come along very quickly.

In the dirt bags I planted lettuce, beans, lettuce, beans. The beans were attacked by some pest early on and only about half of them have made it to maturity. The lettuce is amazing!

 You can see the flower heads on my potatoes in the above picture. I'll tell you what I did for growing potatoes in garbage cans in a later post, but you can see here how wonderful they are looking.

 The tomatoes are out of control. Flowers and fruit and branches everywhere. I think I should do more pruning earlier on next year, but so far so good.

 Here's an overhead shot of the garden with everything growing. I think most of my plants are a week ahead or more. This growth has all taken place in about five weeks.

 And here are the tomatoes I planted in the vertical dirt bags. These are by far the most exuberant of my tomatoes. The dirt used here is Black Gold Organic. It is really good stuff and I might start using it exclusively.

 My squash are looking really good in their pots. Underneath those big leaves are flowers and the beginnings of fruit.

Russian Kale

Chard

 I've been taking one or two of the biggest outside chard leaves for salads, knowing that the chard will continue to grow as I do so. Since I like to simply tear up the chard and put it in the salad uncooked, this method keeps them tender.

So far, so good. Another benefit of the way I have done this is that there is no weeding to do. So I have very little work and can do as much or as little as I want. Ideally, I would like to have a much larger garden and to use the ground soil, amending it over time. However, for throwing a garden together in less than a day, I am pretty pleased with how it has turned out.