Gardening

Downsizing

The window box allotment

Window box gardening

Growing fruits and vegetables in window boxes is particularly easy and satisfying for people with reduced mobility or less space - so get going with Penelope Bennett's introduction to the window box allotment

Window boxes, tubs, flower pots and hanging baskets don't insist on being planted with petunias, geraniums and dusty rags of trailing ivy. They make equally good homes for vegetables, fruit (including small fruit trees) and even spice.

Growing now, in November, in containers on my west-facing, 16 x 9 ft (4.9 x 2.7 m) London roof-garden are green and rainbow Swiss chard, dwarf beans, two types of tomato, perpetual spinach, two different sorts of potato (including some purple New Zealand Maori potatoes which, unusually, are deep papal purple both before and after cooking and have a faint chestnut-ish flavour and texture). Also, some paler purple potatoes from a vegetable shop in Paris, garlic chives, Italian and Greek basil, rosemary, Moroccan mint, Italian rocket, Russian sorrel, Comice pears, figs and the last of the wild and ‘tame’ strawberries.

Next summer there will be even more, such as raspberries, cut-and-come-again lettuce, oca, pak choi, Victoria plums, saffron, etcetera, etcetera. Most of the vegetables and fruits growing now were sown last spring, summer and autumn, except for the spinach and Swiss chard which were sown two years ago.

Almost everyone can have a miniature allotment. Children and older people will find the smallness of containers less intimidating than a large patch of bare earth. Young small hands and elderly stiff hands can 'dig' (or trowel-dig) compost that is only a few inches deep. Pots and tubs are also good for backs that can't bend; for those who find sitting (especially in a wheelchair) easier; and for those who prefer kneeling.

For people who cannot see, window boxes and pots are suitable for fingers to 'walk' over and examine. And for people who live in window ledge-less flats, there is seed-sprouting to try as well as the growing of mushrooms indoors. Only a small investment is needed - hardly an overdraft - and this can be made month by month.

People without and people with gardens can enjoy container gardening. It is quite different from 'garden gardening' because unless you're a snail or a worm, you cannot see seeds sprouting: the eyes are too far away from the ground. But containers can be placed at any level you choose and are on a small scale.

Because this type of gardening is intimate, you become more a part of it and can observe more of what is going on, particularly through a magnifying glass: the seed head forcing its way up through the soil causing a minute earthquake, the alpine strawberry flower mysteriously changing into a fruit and the cucumber slowly fattening and lengthening. Although it is small in scale, the enjoyment, interest and enrichment it produces is immense.

I am not a horticulturist, just an enthusiastic beginner. What follow are not intended to be dictatorial directions, but simply suggestions, which may be followed, partly followed or ignored.

What you will need to begin
  • Seed sowing containers, approximately 6" x 4" x 2" deep with a transparent top. Or use supermarket or take-away plastic trays (in which you have made holes in the bottom for drainage) with tops. Or you can buy a small germination kit which includes trays, tops and a simple propagator.
  • Soil. Multi-purpose organic. This can be used for both sowing seeds (either sieved or un-sieved) and growing plants. You can sieve the soil by rubbing it between your palms as though making pastry or buy a small 6" sieve. Because I dislike the idea of chemicals I always buy organic soil. Pots, tubs can be any old pottery, plastic, wood or metal containers which you already have. They can always be painted at a later date. Most important are their drainage holes, otherwise you'll end up with a series of portable swamps.
  • Tools. You won't really need any. An old serving fork and spoon will do. But if you want to feel more like of a gardener, then you could buy a small trowel and fork. Also a dibber (a tool with a pointed end) for planting and transplanting seedlings.
  • Catalogues. Order mini fruit trees, raspberries and potatoes. Look through seed catalogues.
  • A magnifying glass to enlarge the pleasure of observing germination.
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Penelope Bennett is the author of the Window-box Allotment

By: Penelope Bennett

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