I live in an apartment building and in an area where it's not safe to grow
food crops in the ground because it was a former garbage dump. So I do
container gardening. I grow everything from seed. I'm in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
so am fairly northerly.
I started out indoors with one tomato plant in a 5 gallon pail
purchased from Home Depot.
As the following photo shows, I used stiff fence wire, also purchased from Home Depot,
attached to the exterior of the pail and extending upward to support the plant as
it grew.
I found that I had to keep moving it from room to room during the day in order
to get the best sun, an east window in the morning and a south window during
the remainder of the day. Since it was indoors I started it in the middle of
winter. This worked well since sun was low in the sky
and shone in at a shallow angle covering the plant well. But once the high summer
sun arrived and the plant got taller, only the bottom of the plant was in
direct sunlight due to the steep downward angle with which the sun came through the window.
As tomatoes ripen they give off ethylene, which is supposedly odorless. At the
same time they also give off something that has an odor. Once this started happening
a lot I decided to move the plant outdoors since I strive to keep my indoor
air pure.
But I immediately ran into a problem. The local squirrels loved digging in the soil
in the containers. So I had to come up with some form of cage.
The following photos show my cage solution.
The cages are just mesh, often called chicken wire, with various hole sizes bought
from Home Depot over the years.
They are entirely effective at keeping out the local varmints. As the following
photo shows, I use short pieces of electrical wire to hold the pieces of the
cage together. The photo on the right shows that you can be fairly creative with
how the cage works, in this case with a top that swings open.
Over the years my crop size got more ambitious so I started using a
cage with a wooden frame. The photo below on the right shows that the door
is an entire side of mesh that is held in closed with the usual short pieces
of electrical wire. Top open it, I simply untwist the wire and swing the door
open and around the side out of the way. I hold it open against the side
with another piece of electrical wire.
I started with a simple frame of scrap wood screwed together.
As the following photo shows, the heavy weight of the containers sitting on
the crosspieces of the frame hold it firmly down in case of high winds.
The photo on the right shows that I underestimated how big a cage I'd need
so I simply used short pieces of electrical wire to tie more pieces of
mesh to the side of the initial cage to create a second cage.
The last thing to point out about this cage, as the following photo shows,
is that the mesh provides handy places to tie strings to in order to hold
up my tomato plants. Notice also that this is all taking place at the end
of our apartment building parking lot. Who says you can't grow food in the
big city.
Example foods grown using container gardening
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Here's how I grew some broccoli using this
container gardening technique.
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