#47. Urban Gardening Ideas to Grow Vegetables
Living in the city is great with all the modern conveniences and benefits one enjoys with city life. However, growing vegetables in the city where there is so little space can be pretty tedious. It gets worse if there's no backyard to speak of. What can you do when you enjoy gardening and especially growing your own vegetables? Give up the dream?
No! The following ideas will help you start your own vegetable garden regardless of where in the world you are located. You can choose what suits your circumstances best.
The most popular method of gardening is the container gardening method. This method is ideal for people who have absolutely no space to garden in. If you want something a bit fancy, get store bought containers. Otherwise, if you are happy to settle with what you've got – that's fine too. You can now grow your vegetables without all the extra work of tilling the ground and weeding the beds. You can use plastic, clay or terracotta containers. Make sure the containers are large enough to hold a full grown plant or you will have the hassle of transplanting.
Here's what you need to do – fill the pots with soil and compost, put in seeds or plantings, cover with the soil and water. Put the pots in the sun and make sure the soil does not dry out. Vegetables for the most part need plenty of water and sunlight. If you plan to locate your garden on the rooftop, you may want to first check weight restrictions for your roof. Alternatively, you can use perlite, which is exceptionally light weight.
Lasagna gardening is an organic method of gardening. You build the plant beds by making layers of organic materials. Hay, food scraps, coffee grounds and anything you would normally add to a compost pile. Put the stuff on top of the sod and leave it. Soon the layers will turn into healthy soil that you can work to plant your vegetables. If you can add grass clippings, newspaper, vegetable scraps between the green layers, so much the better. In just a few weeks your two foot high stack will settle down into a really rich, ready for planting soil.
Vertical gardening is one solution that has been around for a while. People who have a serious space problem, but still want to grow their own vegetables can use this method. Basically you train the plants to grow upward rather than horizontally. Planters on windowsills or balconies and hanging baskets, trellises for vines and topsy turvy planters are all ways to get your plants to grow vertically.