Deck Garden: The Beginnings

In a little change of topic from the usual stuff I post - here's some photographic evidence of this year's deck garden. Gordon and I both love the idea of growing our own herbs/vegetables. Of course our space is limited since we opted to go the condo route, for a little while longer. However a big plus about our place is that we have a great back deck with Southern exposure that gets tons of sun. Last year we were pretty successful with tomatoes in pots and herbs in the big planter box. In fact the herb garden was more successful than we ever hoped for. Last year we bought chives, tarragon, oregano, rosemary, thyme and basic from the local flower shop and they did wonderfully. So wonderfully in fact that the chives, tarragon, oregano and thyme have come back on their own this year with VERY little help from us. The huge pile of "grass" in the picture below are the chives - they just went wild this spring . The tarragon is just in front of the chives towards the right and the stuff in the very front is the thyme. It's not looking like the rosemary is going to make a repeat appearance, but we're pretty psyched with the stuff that did return!

On the vegetable side, I've decided to step it up a bit this year with some help from Magee and Stuckey's "Bountiful Container" book. Due to my lack of imagination I'm going with two container gardens that they laid out for me. The first is a succession garden that starts off with snap pea bushes and bok choy. We bought a big old whiskey barrel for this one. Last weekend I planted the peas and bok choy seeds and put some pansy transplants in to make it pretty. I am VERY excited to report that the bok choy has started sprouting already. You can see it a little in the photo below if you look closely in the center of the barrel.

I'm also trying a "toddler garden" for Lily. This container starts out with Easter Egg radishes and Thumbelina carrots surrounded by pretty orange/yellow pansies. The radishes are fun because they are all different colors - so picking them should be neat. The carrots are really cute - they're these little golf ball size/shaped carrots - SO cute. Something has started poking through in this garden too - I think it's probably the radishes - they're supposed to show up first. At this point Lily's only interest in the garden is playing in the dirt. Hopefully she'll be excited to watch the vegetables grow.