Houses are getting bigger and yards are getting smaller. Yet everyone still wants to grow vegetables. With little space available now, you can set up a balcony garden and grow edibles in containers instead. Someone with a lot of experience growing in pots is New Zealander, Fionna Hill and she’s written a new book about it called “How to grow edibles in containers – good produce from small spaces”. Read my review here.
I like Fionna Hill’s open and honest approach to growing vegetables in planters and garden pots throughout this book. She doesn’t sugar coat the reality of the limitations faced when balcony gardening. Growing herbs and vegetables in containers is fun but often faced by failures. I like someone who can admit defeat yet still manage to inspire me to have a go at growing vegetables in pots myself. She does this by offering up some good organic gardening tips for the novice right through to the experienced vegetable gardener.
The pictures are from the author’s own garden, so you can see that she’s done the hard yards and made it work for her. She offers suggestions on growing in terracotta, plastic garden pots, ceramic bowls for micro greens, tins and even a old kitchen colander making everything look quite charming grouped together in her little balcony garden.
Hill gives gardening tips on positioning your plants, watering, growing plants from seeds, seasonal planting and fertilising your vegetables. Gardening tips on how to include kids is also covered. The book has an extensive list of 45 individual herbs and vegetables suitable to grow in pots and containers and finishes with a few favourite recipes using the produce you’ve grown.
Sometimes a book is not enough and you might want to ask questions directly. So why not host a workshop with some friends and I’ll come over and show you how it’s done personally. Go to my workshop page for more details.
Fionna Hill is a London trained florist and has written 5 other books including “how to grow micro-greens (2010). Fionna lives in Aukland, New Zealand.
How to Grow Edibles in Containers –
Good Produce from Small Spaces
CSIRO Publishing, May 2015, Paperback, 108 pages.
AU $29.95
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