A First-Year Experience in Container Gardening

By Katina Mooneyham

Growing vegetables in a regular garden just didn’t work. It took too much effort to control weeds, pests and a couple of critters called raccoons. So I decided to try growing in containers. At first, I thought that meant going to the store and buying some pretty pots. As inexpensive as they were, I was going to need a lot of them to make up the space I needed. So I started thinking of the things I could use as containers just until I had the money.

I have eight cats, six inside cats and two outdoors. Now these cats go through a lot of cat litter in a month’s time. I have all these 27-35 pound cat litter containers hanging around my garage, most times until I manage to put them out to the garbage dump. I thought I’d try to use a cat litter container as a make-shift planter. I cleaned it out thoroughly with a little soap and water. I knew it had to have holes in the bottom to allow for sufficient drainage. I drilled holes into it with a smaller sized drill bit. I plopped the potting soil and behold! A garden pot was born! My kids think I should have decorated up the sides so that the kitty litter panels wouldn’t show up but it didn’t bother me a bit. I was recycling something that would just end up in the trash anyway.

In that same week, I got my answer to how I was going to plant the squash. I knew the squash would need some significant room to bush out. I was driving down a back country road and came upon a heap of tires. I thought I remember reading somewhere that tires would make excellent planters. I grabbed a few and by the end of the season was very surprised at the results. Not only did my squash go crazy in the tires, we had enough squash for the whole neighborhood.

I lost my first lettuces to the critters called raccoons. But not because they ate them. They tipped them over and spilled out the lettuces. What a huge mess it caused. But I as determined to set it right. I soon learned to plant the lettuces in a garden away from the deck. I came upon some idea of using cinder (concrete) blocks to make a raised bed. Similar to a container garden, a raised bed garden would be better suited to lettuce gardening. So I made my first bed using cinder blocks. They never lined up completely as I planned them but they worked out just fine. The lettuces grew, so did the spinach that I threw in beside the lettuce.

I had two small kids blue swimming pools just wasting space in the yard so I used them as a lettuce garden as well. I cut more holes in the pools and filled them with lettuce and one was filled with onion sets.

With a little thought and creativity, anything can become a planter. Before you throw it out, think. Could I envision something grown in this?

Katina Mooneyham is the contributing editor at Little Gardeners, a site for kid’s gardening. You can check out more ideas for gardening, especially gardening with kids at Little Gardeners http://www.gardenandhearth.com/LittleGardeners.htm