Finding creative ways to cultivate your crops means you can pack more in or grow food in places you wouldn’t have imagined you could!
Quirky Containers
Let’s start with the fun! Quirky containers are a great way to add additional interest to your patio plantings of fruits and vegetables. Old clothing, boots of blooms, even an old chest of drawers – anything that holds soil is fair game.
For sheer rustic charm, try sourcing old wooden crates to plant up with all manner of herbs, salad leaves or fruiting vegetables such as tomatoes.
Recycle Old Into New
Crops in tyres not only look quirky, it’s a great way to recycle too. Turn the tyres inside out to create planters. Or stack them up for growing potatoes, which need gradual ‘earthing up’ as they grow. Larger tractor tyres offer a really wide growing space every bit as useful as a raised bed.
Old hessian sacks give a natural look and you can cut hut holes into the sides to poke through plugs of leafy salads and herbs. You could also use them to disguise plastic pots of vegetables fixed onto walls.
Fans of growing bags needn’t throw them out at the end of the season. Dig over the potting soil inside, fork in an organic fertiliser, then plant up with leafy overwintering vegetables including chard and winter lettuce.