Growing Fruit Trees in Containers

When I was younger I remember my grandmother growing an orange tree in a 5 gallon bucket.  She enjoyed it as a houseplant, but I'm sure it never yielded any fruit.  We were in rural Missouri mind you...so orange trees were a novelty to me.  Now I live in Florida and it's difficult to drive anywhere in rural areas of Central Florida without seeing an orange grove at some point during the trip.

I was searching around on the Internet for ideas to grow food in my backyard and I kept running into references to growing fruit trees in containers.  The University of Florida IFAS Extension has a detailed article explaining some of the in's and out's.


Besides the obvious advantage of being portable, using containers to grow trees is also advantageous if you have poor soil conditions or unfavorable conditions during certains times of the year. They can be strategically pruned to keep the trees a more manageable size. In smaller backyards, using containers is a viable method to have several types of fruit trees within a small area.

According to the IFAS Extension website,  most commercial potting soil is suitable, but a favorite soil recipe includes "a mixture of 1 part sand, 1 part peat and 1 part bark, perlite or vermiculite will also serve quite well".

Part of my future gardening plans include growing blackberries and this container method sounds like something I should try.

I am unsure whether it has a lot of information on fruit trees specifically, but I found a book by Stella Otto titled The Backyard Orchardist that looks promising for backyard growers.

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Why Grow Food?

There are multiple reasons for learning to grow food:  To save money, to eat healthier, it’s good exercise, and it’s a nice hobby, but perhaps there is an even better reason – it’s nice to know where your food comes from.

It’s probably not possible to grow everything you eat in your backyard, especially if yours is as small as mine (think postage stamp), but you would be surprised how much of your own food you can grow in a small place.

You don’t need farm land, a large yard, or a lot of space, but a little creativity goes a long way.  You can use a raised bed garden, commercially available growing boxes, growing bags, or plastic buckets.  You can even use common flower pots. It’s really up to you.

The food you buy at the local grocery store may have been grown in your own town, in the next town over, or a town 2,000 miles away. You really have no way of knowing.  But, if you grow it yourself you control those variables.

Growing food helps develop a certain source of security for families - security in terms of not being completely reliant on someone else to feed us.  It's an opportunity to learn about food and the work it takes to provide it.  It's an opportunity to teach children about it.

Growing food is becoming a lost art.  Our parents and grandparents grew a large majority of the vegetables they ate.  They grew so much food that they couldn't eat it all, so they canned it for later use and kept in the cellar to preserve it.  They shared it with their friends, their neighbors, and their extended families.  Growing food provided a sense of community.

We look forward to learning, and in some cases re-learning, how to do the things our grandparents took for granted in terms of growing food.

We hope you will join us.

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Organic, All Natural, Sustainable, Grass Fed...

Organic, All Natural, Sustainable, Grass Fed, non-GMO, local food, and know your farmer are all words or phrases that are floating around in the blogosphere, on Twitter, Facebook, and in news feeds. 

Our intention in starting our little postage-stamp-sized backyard garden was not to support any one food movement or philosophy, but to take action and do something. 

We are a member of an Organic CSA, a local food buying club, and in the last year we started our own above ground garden.   It is a far cry from the family gardens we grew up with.  Now I wonder why I didn’t listen and do more when I had my parents to advise me.

It’s exciting when we can make an entire meal out of veggies we’ve grown in our backyard.  But, we’ve also learned our first gardening lesson recently.  We need a bigger garden if we plan not to starve!!! And we need to do better with planning what veggies to grow (and when), but we’re definitely achieving our primary short term goal and taking action.

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Grilling Vegetables

Like most people, I like just about any kind of meat cooked over fire on the grill.  From hamburgers and pork chops to steaks and chicken, it's all good.  I'll even settle for meat cooked on a propane grill from time to time, but traditional grilling over charcoal briquettes is pretty hard to beat. 

Most of my friends wouldn't really consider cooking vegetables on the grill, but they don't really know what they are missing.  I mean if you're going to fire up the grill, why not grill the entire meal?

Onions, green peppers, red peppers, asparagus, cabbage, corn on the cob, mushrooms, squash, zucchini, egg plant, and the list goes on....

Here's a short recipe for grilling vegetable kabobs:

Grilled Vegetables

• Chop your vegetables into halves, quarters, or eighths.
• Brush them lightly with butter or cooking oil.
• Sprinkle them with some herbs and spices, or simply use salt and pepper to taste.
• Thread them through kabobs and cook them on the grill turning to prevent excessive charring.
• Or if you prefer, you can wrap them in foil.
• You can also marinade the veggies first in salad dressing or something similar if you prefer.

I grilled these vegetables with some chicken marinated in some Lawry's.

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Our First Earthbox

We decided to purchase an Earthbox for growing cucumbers. Here's a few pictures I took during the assembly process.  You can use transplants or seeds. We opted for seeds and planted 4 of them as per the Earthbox instruction manual. The bedding covers are reversible - black on one side and white on the other. According to the instructions, the white colored cover will reduce chances of overheating the bin in warmer climates.



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Square Foot Gardening

Gardening by the "square", or "square foot gardening" has been around for a couple of decades now, but the basic technique dates back even farther.  Biodynamic gardening and French intensive growing methods are other names for the same basic goal of getting the highest possible production from a minimum land area.

As described in Mother Earth News, Alan Chadwick, an English actor and painter introduced intensive gardening techniques at the University of California Santa Cruz campus in 1966. John Jeavons, from Stanford, California experimented with the method and has been able to improve production 4 to 6 times more than traditional U.S. farming methods.

Mel Bartholomew, a civil engineer who wrote book about intensive gardening, has made Square Foot Gardening a term familar to millions.  Using above ground boxes, Mr. Bartholomew demonstrated techniques for growing vegetables in backyards, on patios, and even decks with great results. Here's additional explanation courtesy of Wikipedia:

Square Foot Gardening is the practice of planning small but intensively planted gardens. The phrase "square foot gardening" was popularized by Mel Bartholomew in a 1981 Rodale Press book and subsequent PBS television series. The practice combines concepts from other organic gardening methods, including a strong focus on compost, closely planted raised beds and biointensive attention to a small, clearly defined area. Proponents claim that the method is particularly well-suited for areas with poor soil, beginning gardeners or as adaptive recreation for those with disabilities.

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Earthbox Garden Kit

Using an Earthbox Garden Kit can be a great way to start growing your own garden. 

In some areas, it's not practical to plant seeds in the ground.  Not all soil is fertile. Some soil is contaminated. Some is too sandy. Some has too much clay.  The Earthbox provides an alternative.

Product description from Amazon.com:

The patented EarthBox was developed by commercial farmers and proven in the lab and on the farm. This maintenance-free, award-winning, high-tech growing system controls soil conditions, eliminates guesswork and more than doubles the yield of a conventional garden with less fertilizer, less water and virtually no effort!

We've recently purchased an Earthbox for our own use.  We plan to include it as a part of our own comprehensive backyard food growing strategy. Read more about the Earthbox and it's inventor, Blake Whisenant.

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