One of the biggest difficulties of city gardening is the mess of getting started. When you're gardening in pots and containers you need to fill them up, turn the earth, water it and plant seeds or small seedlings. This is hard work, and messy. How do you get those unwieldy bags of potting soil home? What about your three-story walkup?
Here are a few tips for the logistics of city gardening. We have muddied our kitchen floor a few times, playing in the dirt, and it's always worth it in the end. But there are a few things that can help you keep the process manageable - even in a small apartment.
• Buy smaller bags of dirt - Obvious, yes, but sometimes we get carried away at the garden center and forget that we are going to have to sling those giant bags of dirt around all by ourselves at home.
• Take a friend - Go in with a friend on all your container gardening shopping; you can split things that you don't need, and you can keep each other from getting too excited by all the plants you could grow! Sometimes it helps to have a reality check when confronted by eight kinds of tomatoes and five kinds of lavender.
• Have a party in the park - Meet up with other friends and a few bags of potting soil in the park or a green public space. You can fill pots and trade plants there, leaving any extra soil behind where it won't be a mess. You'll need a cab and a lot of help to get home, though; those filled pots can be heavy! This works best with small pots of herbs and other houseplants.
• Use your bathtub - The tub is the most contained spot in the house for dumping soil, filling pots, and washing them down. Yes, you'll have to clean the tub afterwards (and make sure that no gravel or thick chunks go down the drain) but if you have no outside spot to garden, then this is the best. It keeps all that wonderful yet messy dirt well contained.
• Start and end on the same day - One of the best tips we have for keeping gardening manageable is to buy dirt, plants and seeds - and get them all set up right away. The longer that our gardening stuff sits around, the less likely we are to do actually use it. It also takes up a lot of space in a small city apartment. Make your plans so you can buy dirt, fill pots, start seeds, transplant herbs and get everything done that you can in just one day.
What other tips do you have for handling the logistics of gardening in the city?
(Image: Faith Hopler and Carrie M. Burke)
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Lay out newspapers to catch dirt when you're repotting or filling a pot.
I take over my little cement stoop for a little while and pray that the neighbors don't mind stepping around me. so far, no one has! Also, put everything into 2 buckets and carry them to where I am going to be working, then everything is within reach and you just repack the buckets to clean up. That is also where I store the gardening tools for easy access and transport.
i also lay down newspaper. i do my potting on the kitchen counter. i'm not doing anything big and crazy though. i only have indoor windowsills to garden on...
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I definitely pot my plants in the tub!
Since I'm growing the stuff outdoors and its dirty anyway, I just use a dustpan and broom to sweep up the stuff before I water everything. This on my rear access steps and luckily I'm the top apartment so there's no one who needs to walk past.---For the people who garden exclusively indoors some stores offer a repotting service if you buy the pot and the plant at the same store then you get the dirt for free and your nails stay clean (Home Depot comes to mind but I could be wrong).
This was my first time doing window boxes in a 4th floor walk up and doing a bunch of balcony containers. I put a layer of glass bottles along the bottom of the very deep ones to take up some volume and then added the soil while they were in the braces. I potted everything right there and just kept the vacuum on hand. I also made sure to take my shoes off before leaving the space so that I wouldn't track mud all over the house.
I lay out newspaper, too. I also do my best to plant after the frost-free date, but before my downstairs neighbors have cleaned their porches for the season, so hopefully the stray dirt isn't too noticable.
I have personally never had an issue carrying the largest sized-bags of potting soil up to the third floor, and I am not buff in the least. Carrying up multiple small bags would be annoying!
Hire someone to do it for you.
Starting and ending on the same day really is the key to successfully getting the garden going! I don't have a car, so I find the easiest thing to do is to plan out how many bags of soil I need and how many pots, and just truck it all home via cab in one afternoon (I use the morning to go to the farmers market and get all the herbs I want to put in). It's good to slightly overestimate how much soil you need so that you only have to make this trip once- you can always use the excess for repotting houseplants or sprinkling on your building flowerbed. For the mess, I lay down an old tarp on the balcony and just fling the soil around all I want. Easy to funnel the excess back into the soil bag or the final planter when you're done!
I have a related question -- what to do with the leftover soil? And the same question for when repotting? Or at the end of the season when the basil dies?
I live next to a park and have been "giving" it my excess, but don't think this is what I should be doing...
Best piece of equipment I used on planting day: A restaurant-style bus tub. We used it to carry transplants that I picked up at the farmer's market, and we used another one to mix dirt. Very easy to hose off after use or put in the bathtub to rinse.