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Container gardening is a great way for those who lack growing space or who want to improve their growing skills to get started with gardening. We’ll show you how we’re working on our skills with a cheap and easy container garden and provide links to a boatload more resources to get you started.
We built our off-grid house on 16 acres, but while we were building we lived in a condo with a deck and a patio. That’s it. And while we have about 2 acres of cleared land at our property, we didn’t want to plant yet because we still had some big trucks and machinery left to do some work for things like the septic field and cistern. Plus, we really wanted to take the time to amend our soil to prepare for gardening using some basics of permaculture, so planting in that rocky clay soil didn’t seem wise.
Even now that we live here off the grid and have gotten to garden in our actual ground, containers are still useful for us. There are many herbs, flowers, and other plants that I keep in containers on our patio or near the doors.
Come see how we created our container garden and find links to tons of creative resources.
How We Created Our Container Garden For Free
I didn’t want to spend money on containers when I knew there were plenty of free materials out there. I asked at our local grocery store bakery if they had any buckets left over, since their frostings, fillings, and other items often come in large food-grade buckets. To my delight, the woman behind the counter loaded up my cart with eight free buckets!
This will be our fourth growing season using these buckets and most of them have held up well. Some have cracked and chipped edges from aging out in the sun, which is to be expected. This is what they looked like the first season we used them:
Check out this post to find out exactly how we prepared the buckets for planting, and learn the cool mini-hugelkultur soil layering method we found that helped us grow larger, healthier plants!
Container Gardening Resources for Beginners (and fellow brown thumbs!)
I’m no master gardener, so I need all the help I can get! Luckily, I have some great links for you to get your container garden growing!
Container Gardening with Fun Planters to Suit Your Style
How to Get Cheap Planters for Your Container Garden
Unique and Inexpensive Gardening With Gutters
Five Best Container Vegetables for Beginners – Brown Thumb Mama
Container Vegetable Gardening – Walkerland
Grow Bags – Northern Homestead
Growing Greens In Containers – Homestead Dreamer
How to Farm or Garden When You Have No Land Whatsover – Heirloom Soul
Vegetables in Pots – Imperfectly Happy Homesteading
Easy to Grow Vegetables – Imperfectly Happy Homesteading
Resources for growing specific plants in containers:
Quick Guide to Growing Tomatoes – Hillsborough Homesteading
Transplanting Tomatoes to the Greenhouse – Country Living in a Cariboo Valley
Tomato Suckers – 104 Homestead
10 Things About Tomatoes – You Should Grow
Tomato Planter – Grace and Garden Homestead
Best Heirloom Tomatoes – Joybilee Farm
Harvest Lettuce So It Keeps Producing – Grace and Garden Homestead
Growing Sugar Snap Peas – Better Hens and Gardens
How To Grow Peas – The Free Range Life
Growing Eggplant – The Free Range Life
Want to build a homestead of your own someday? Learn all about our off-grid cordwood homestead project here and sign up to get access to all of our free homestead creator’s guides in our Resource Library!
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