COLUMNIST: ELI APPLEBY-DONALD
You might be surprised with just how I have utilised space in my city garden to grow lots of food as well as pack it with all my favourite flowers.
I do have the traditional veg garden area with some raised beds and that was the way in which I started my growing journey. They are great and I would not be without them but the reason they are there is because, at that point in my journey, I just assumed that “this was how things were done”. I did not have the experience or the knowledge yet to consider breaking with tradition and finding my own way. Now though, I grow more than twice as much, but I have not added extra raised beds, instead, I have opted for alternative ways to grow.
I have three areas for you to think about if you want to better use the space you have.
When you only have a small amount of space, you really need to make the most of it, after all, if you only have a few pots on a patio then you do not want them to sit full of green leaves for most of the year while you wait on your first harvest. Instead think about those crops which are fast to grow, and maybe even those that can be sown, grown, and harvested in just a few weeks, letting you replant and get another harvest on the way.
The most well-known of the fast crops are microgreens and pea shoots, some of which you can be harvesting in as little as two weeks and they are great for adding to sandwiches and salads. Some of those microgreens can be left a little longer to continue to grow into full-sized leaves, or you can sow salad leaves, spinach, and even radishes to make your own salads, usually in three to four weeks from sowing to harvest.
Imagine just how many harvests you could get out of that window box, patio container, or hanging basket with clever, fast-growing choices.
Another option is spring onions, even a small pot can give you lots of spring onions and any you do not use will continue to grow, giving you bigger bulb ends later in the year.
Want something with a bit more crunch? Try switching salad crops to dwarf carrots or dwarf green beans in summer. They take a little longer, usually a couple of months once the weather picks up, but there is nothing like that feeling of picking bean pods from the plant or pulling root veg from the ground. I’ve even got some smaller varieties of courgettes in some deeper containers.
When we stand in the garden, we most often look around and judge our space by how many square metres (or feet) of ground we have, but we often forget that our gardens are a three-dimensional space: look up and even, look through.
You may only have enough ground space for a handful of pots on your patio or even along a fence or wall, but those pots only need to be the place for the roots to thrive. Consider using trellising above your pots and grow climbing or sprawling crops like raspberries or blackberries which can then be tied along the fence or wall using a trellis.
Use this same idea and a larger pot, to grow fruit trees and tie those branches along the trellising. I have done this in my garden with a couple of large pots and now a once boring space has become my fruit wall, covered in big, sweet, thornless blackberries, tied neatly along the length of the fence. So not only have we made great use of that fence (the space above the pots) but it has the bonus of turning a boring garden fence into a beautiful wall of flowers and then fruit.
If you are not a huge fan of growing fruit you can use the same principle of trellising and grow beans or peas up a fence, a wall, or even wig-wam style with some bamboo canes pressed into the container soil. You will be surprised at just how many beans and pea you can harvest over the summer months.
Another way I have utilised vertical space in my garden is with a homemade planter using some old wooden pallets to make a wall of planting pockets. If you are not the DIY type, you can buy stepped planters or ladder planters that work in exactly the same way.
It is a great way to grow cascading crops like strawberries or even tumbling varieties of tomatoes, having lots more plants in that same footprint of space. Tumbling tomatoes and strawberries grow really well in hanging baskets and pots too.
If you only have a small patch of ground or a raised bed to grow in, you can utilise the space to its full potential by intercropping, which simply means planting fast-and slow growing crops together. Lots of the plants which will eventually take up a large amount of space like tomatoes and potatoes, do not actually use this space until they have grown to their full size so you can take advantage of this by planting some faster-growing plants like radishes, salad leaves, beetroot, or even carrots, in the soil in between rows of the larger plants. By the time the space is needed by the larger plants, you will have harvested your faster-growing veggies.
Take time to think about the plants themselves. If you do want to try growing some of the more traditional veg, look out for dwarf varieties of plants or even compact growing plants. You often hear of patio fruit trees for example, which is a great option for the small space gardener.
These are trees grown as a thinner column rather than the wide canopy of a traditional tree. They can be grown in large pots or in the ground, but their tall, thin growing habit means you can have a few of these on a patio, against the fence, or in that sunny corner you cannot use for much else.
Reimagining your space to grow produce in containers; to grow up, along, and in between; to choose dwarf or patio varieties, can be a great way to use your small space to its maximum edible potential..
Eli Appleby-Donald, of @inthegardenwitheliandkate, tends a productive garden in Musselburgh, East Lothian, on the principle that gardening should be fun. She has an urban garden which she has managed to make as beautiful and productive as possible, given it is north facing and mostly in shade. She considers herself a perpetual learner gardener, and has spent the last 11 years learning by experience, success, and failure.
A digital education guru by day, the lack of good information about growing in Scotland when she started, spurred Eli into putting those skills in action, and she regularly blogs and vlogs about gardening on her own website and YouTube channel, as well as appearing as a guest on others worldwide.
You can find out more about Eli and all the fun of creating your own suburban garden paradise on either her YouTube channel, or her website.