In early summer of 2010, I began to challenge a long-held opinion that I had a black thumb. All my previous attempts to grow things had failed miserably, mostly due to my poor stewardship and lack of true interest.
That began to change when I became a father. I started really looking into what we put in our mouths as food, what labeling tells us is "safe" and "natural", and the total cost of bringing this food to markets for me and my family to consume. We purchased a CSA farm share, which changed the way we looked at food quality and preparation time, and allowed us to stretch our legs at a local farm each weekend.
It was a slow but purposeful separation from a lifestyle unintentionally driven by what could be packaged and shipped to us as non-perishables as cheaply as possible in a grocery store setting.
That summer, I purchased some tomato, eggplant, and cucumber plants. I stuck them on the 2nd floor back roof (no porch, just roof and fire escape) and watered them when they looked like they needed it. It was fun and enlightening, but not cost effective.
That winter I tried my hand at hydroponic lettuce in the windows. While also fun and enlightening, it definitely did not produce the quality or quantity veg that I wanted to have on my plate. It did however teach me the value of a light source, proper nutrients, and environmental variables (such as pH, EC, salinity, and air flow) as well as toleration ranges for common veg plants.
The challenge of growing indoors with only two window spaces drove me to do much more outdoors for 2011. I decided to scale the back roof operation out a bit. I got some "fish buckets" from a neighbor, sourced some free soil from a college compost pile, received some seeds from a friend, and began sowing them and transplanting nursery starts as the space allowed. I fertilized every few weeks with liquid fish fertilizer, and amended one box with glacial rock dust. And we had a [very] small crop of assorted veggies throughout the season, even without successive sowing. Municipal water, relatively last minute planting, and no vertical support were all clear faults that would have to be remedied in the year to come.
Container growing is very different than cultivating a plot of land. There are common themes, soil and selection choices, but not having "buffer zone" like a traditional garden means that every little detail matters in the containers. Soil balance, plant tolerances, temperatures, wind, watering schedule...they all have to be part of a conscious effort to maintain and optimize conditions.
Over the winter, I developed a habit of researching everything I could learn about container and raised bed gardening, books, YouTube, podcasts, online articles and forums. The number one theme I found was to "build your soil biology", meaning that it's more effective to develop the means by with plants thrive than on trying to buy or cultivate big plants. This is IMO because nature already has the means to thrive in the right conditions; we simply have to know and respect those conditions. So I hopped on the compost/inoculant/mineralization train and never looked back.
Thanks to a tidy tax refund for 2012, we began planning the garden in January 2013. We bought seeds from Johnny's Seeds in Maine, planned and drew up a timeline the back roof soil boxes, and researched non-municipal watering options. I bought some soil blocking tools and began to experiment with indoor soil/medium growing again using worm castings, coconut coir, and other natural (OMRI certified) amendments. The plan was to use the Square Foot Gardening (SFG) technique in the fish buckets, using soil blocks to start seeds indoors under greenhouse-like conditions.
We remedied the prior years errors by buying some wooden treated lattice, a gravity fed drip line irrigation system, and pre-emptive soil amendments well in advance of sowing and transplanting some final frost date. To date, I have spent a lot of time and a bit of money getting these conditions properly set, but with a little maintenance to open and close the gardening season each year, these improvements put us on an equivalent track with that of a 2' x 20' raised bed for years to come. For renters of a 2nd floor apartment in a dense urban area, this is really an accomplishment.
