The Productive Home Garden or Patio Garden
Bumper crops are basically the result of fine tuning the gardening practices you use, and adding other productive practices.
And this goes for whether you’re looking to increase the poundage from your plot or containers, or if you’re intrigued by the beauty of growing things and want to make where you live a true garden home.
The trick is … finding the right practices for your specific location and perfecting them.
The Ambitious Gardener
Now, what if you could double the amount of whatever you want to grow?
Nope, this is not an advertising headline. We’re not tryin’ to sell you anything. (We leave that chore to our sponsors.) What we would like to sell you is some practical, straightforward things to do to make your garden stunningly productive.
We’re talkin’ home garden practices that experienced gardeners (not to mention top notch horticulturalists) have tried and proven and found very much to their liking.
Here’s a fact that we stumbled over recently that really blew us away (we do a lot of stumbling around here.) Writing (February 2009) about the renewed popularity of gardening at home, Texas A&M Assistant Professor Joseph Masabni pointed out that these days “most gardens [are] located in urban areas.” And even urban areas can indeed support the genuine garden home.
We liked Professor Masabni’s whole piece, by the way. Of course, the focus is the Texas garden, and so a lot of the specifics—like planting times—won’t apply everywhere.
But even so, the piece, “Texas Home Vegetable Gardening Guide,” is super useful for the basics it lays out. So if you’re interested, just click on the following blue link Home Garden Guide for Vegetable Gardening and it will take you right to the Texas A&M website where you can download the PDF.
Home gardening works. A home garden can be anywhere indoors or outdoors (needs sun.) And the amount of food or flowers you can get out of a home garden can be truly astounding. And the pages in this our Gardening Headquarters website are going to lead you down the sunny path to being astounded.
Patio Garden
Further proof of the popularity and productivity of gardening is the ascent of the Patio Garden. Obviously, a it's a type of home garden and as well important to the concept of the garden home. Of course, the patio garden is closely integrated with the residence itself, and usually connected by a door. This includes high rise apartment buildings that can have both balconies and sometimes quite large outdoor spaces (terraces) perfect for a patio garden.
Norman Winter—a Mississippi State University horticulturist, extension Instructor there, and a widely published and aired garden writer—points out that the patio garden grew up in Europe, and is now going great guns in the U. S. Also in his brief column he recounts a visit to a (2008) commercial garden show that illustrates the bumper crop possibilities available for the patio garden, and equally applicable to the idea of a garden home.
Productivity was clearly on Winter’s mind as he toured the show. Here’s a typical comment. “They [the show’s exhibitors] had created at their trial site a deck and patio with bountiful hanging baskets of tomatoes like Tumbling Tom, and a yellow version of this. They had containers with small but sturdy Totem tomato plants that were loaded with fruit.” (Winter’s short article is available here if you’d like to read it: Patio Garden Bounty and Beauty.)
Patio Garden Strawberries: One of the most popular crops grown nearly everywhere is strawberries. Melissa Miles and Mary Beth Musgrove from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System say in their brief, tantalizing article, “There are few things in life as good as fresh strawberries.” (Click on fresh succulent strawberries in the patio garden.) Attention to a few, practical chores means that you can have breakfast in the patio garden with fresh strawberries right off the vine!
Garden Home
There is a gardening idea that has been popularized by the well known gardening writer and garden show television personality P. Allen Smith. The subtitle of his website is: “Blurring the lines between home and garden.” But that’s not all this approach is.
As you may also know, Mr. Smith has a background as a garden designer. And that’s another clue to what this design philosophy emphasizes: A look and feel for an expanded personal experience in a closeness not just to nature but of life itself. And a key to how the garden home creates this closeness is that the garden “looks right,” the house “looks right.”
And to us a productive patio garden, or a larger outdoor home garden, or even a container garden, contributes to the “rightness” of the garden home. To us, the garden home needs to be a rich environment as well as a beautiful garden home environment.
So … we encourage you to explore our pages and the many (non-commercial) highly informative references we supply.