Container Gardening and Fall Gardening

We have limited room to garden because our small back yard is fairly shady.  We try to grow things in a couple of Earth Boxes but with only limited success.   The vast majority of our gardening is in two community garden beds - one in ground (spouse) and one raised bed (mine, due to my back issues) which spouse ends up doing most of the maintenance on while I work part time.

I have written about our home container gardening in the past and wanted to give you a quick tour of that, including a not too successful raised bed on the side of our house.  I also wanted to answer a question put by one of my regular readers (thank you!) asking what we plant for fall in our gardens.

Turns out I took enough pictures for two (or maybe more) posts.

Parsley.  We have to keep this elevated because of groundhog problems at our house. We tried planting from seed this year, but the seedlings all died.  This year, all the plants seem to be bolting.   No idea why. (And yes, in case you were wondering, we also have sage, rosemary and thyme in our sunny front yard.  The rosemary must be overwintered indoors.

Beets (left) and basil (right).  Basil is looking a bit worn in the pot.  We bought a flat of small basil seedlings and didn't dare separate them, so the whole thing went in the large pot.  

 

Our raised bed has to compete with a maple for water but we've found kale will grow in it.  We had romaine lettuce in here, too, until the groundhog found it.  The rest of what is growing in here are onions (for green onions). It wasn't meant as a fall crop but it's going to become one.  Someone at our community garden gave away excess onion bulb starts he had purchased, and we were one of the beneficiaries.  (Thank you!) By the way, the two pink things in the box are plastic pink flamingos hiding from the camera.  Please don't judge.

Here are the two Earth Boxes.  One has carrots growing, and we hope we get a crop.  The other box has kale planted in it (not yet germinated) as a fall crop.  We had tried planting fall peas in it but only one seed germinated. I suspect we didn't plant it deep enough for summer planting.

Last but not least for today, two ornamental strawberry plants in a large hanging basket.  Yes, I do get an occasional (and small, and tart) strawberry, if I beat the birds to them.  You can see one - a small pop of red - in the lower right.

No ginger this year.  We gave up on it a while back.

Other fall crops we hope to get to harvest?  A planting of beans (a gamble crop) is in where our main crop onions were harvested in the garden. And we are still thinking on the others.  Unfortunately, our garden opened late for unavoidable reasons, and so we are already pushing our first frost date (which, last year, was in September but is normally in October).