Container Vegetable garden

by Barbara
(San Diego)

Hi - in these tough economic times - my kids and I have decided to start a vegetable garden. With both limited space and resources - we have opted to try growing vegetables in containers. We purchased some pots and a half oak barrel - the problem is can we use the oak barrel to plant our peppers(green, jalenpenos, cayanne) and our herbs(basil, thyme, chives ect.) as well as, other vegetables - except of course tomatoes? I guess my seminal question is: How can we maximize space and plant together?

Doug says that each plant requires a certain amount of space or it won't grow properly. As soon as the leaves begin to touch on your plants, then you know they've run out of room. If this touching is at the end of the season, you're fine. If at the beginning, you have a problem because overlapping leaves stop the bottom leaves from growing and the lack of air circulation leads to disease establishment.

That's the long way of saying you can't crowd your plants. So if your pepper requires a square foot to grow, that's what you have to give it. You can put your lettuce closer but when they start overlapping, you have to harvest one or the other to give the other room to grow.

You don't say what size the pots are but if no more than 12-inches across, they're going to handle one pepper plant each with maybe a bit of thyme underneath the pepper.

The oak barrel could use the tomato in the middle - growing up a stake (tie it up the sturdy stake because it's going to be heavy) and then surrounded by lettuce, basil and other plants. As you harvest, you can control the growth to make sure the leaves don't overlap.

Good luck. Remember that it's not as hard as it seems and that nobody (well few) get it right the first 30 years they garden. I'm still working on getting it right. :-)