Apple Tree update

Awhile back, I planted a stick in the ground that Henry Field's assured me was a Sweet Sixteen apple sapling. I was dubious it would turn into anything, because it was only about 18 inches long and not much bigger in diameter than a #2 pencil. I am pleased to report that it not only survived, but it's done pretty well:

I not inviting any of you over for apple pie this fall or anything, but I'm saying the tree now vaguely resembles a young tree, and I'm not actively embarrassed to have such a beefy support for a tiny twig. Maybe next fall (or more likely Fall of 2012) we'll actually get some fruit...

The Greenhouse is Up

The greenhouse is up and functional. Here's a pictorial description of the process:

The structure with the deer (squirrel) netting still up and row covers on.

A big hunk of greenhouse plastic, donated generously by my horticulturist friend Gwen.

To get the plastic over the ribs, first put a rock on one side...

Then attach a cord around the rock and pull the cord from the far side.

The plastic is up and my 1-meter tall child stands in as a height reference.

At the bottom, roll lath into the plastic and nail down.

The plastic ,after being secured on all sides.

A crisscross of guy rope goes over the top and through screw eyes at the bottom, to help keep the plastic on where it should be and to make the structure a little more stable.

The inside view of the greenhouse after the plastic is on.

I am happy to report that the greenhouse survived the 40-50+ mph winds that arose the following days, without a bit of damage. The ribs are independently flexible and the plastic is tough, so while the shape of the arch was...altered...at times, no problems arose and the plants didn't even notice the storm.

Here's to some later fall/winter produce!

Shifting to Fall

Temperatures are dropping around Chicago, and this is normally the time when I'd been doing a fall clean-up, some final mulching, and putting my garden to bed for the winter.

But not this year!


This is the winter of Eliot Coleman, when Melissa and I are going to try our hand at Fall gardening aiming for a winter harvest. Here's where we are as of the start of October:

Planted right now (clockwise from bottom left) are Romaine and Buttercrunch lettuce, endive, yellow globe onions, bunching onions, full-grown endive, carrots in various stages from seedling to mature, tomato plants up against the house (1 box wrapped, 1 unwrapped to see the difference), mache, more lettuce, spinach, and a fallow place for garlic that's just outside the picture in the lower right.

As you can see, I have row covers in place. These let in about 80% of the light and are water-permeable. They have the added benefits of keeping out insects and providing some cover from the wind. I will say that they make my seedlings look beautiful:

Another new experiment for this Fall is the mache bed. These hardy little salad greens can germinate at 35 degrees and can bounce back from -5 if necessary. The adult plants are only about 4 inches across, so it takes a lot of plants for a salad. So, I've planted about 1200 plants in my bed and they're just starting to pop up:

They're a little hard to see in this picture, but they're there.

One of the successes this summer season has been the raspberries. All of the canes in this picture started as tiny 4"-6" transplant cuttings that came from my 5-year old bush on the side of the dog run.

As you can see, they did very well, despite having the fence in front of them completely overwhelmed by cantaloupe vines for much of the summer. Maybe they decided to grow tall to compensate.

I have noticed that the Fall temps do slow down germination and growth, so I'll keep you apprised of our progress every so often. Check back for more later, especially when we install the plastic on our greenhouse...

Yes, I'm back...

The Greenhouse in its summer look.

My blogging attention always flags in July. I start out with the best of intentions, but when summer is in full bloom, I always vanish from the blogosphere for a good month. Perhaps things get too busy, or maybe I can't imagine anyone caring how many heads or broccoli I picked or how many raspberries I harvested or how my carrots are coming along. Whatever the reason for my silence, it happens every year right on schedule.

This is the deer netting.

For those of you who have been following my greenhouse series, I have indeed completed the project and I present the pictures to prove it. The hoops were installed and painted and the perlin (ridge pole) lashed in place, and the whole structure is pretty solid. I used deer netting (a thin, black plastic mesh in about 3/4" squares) to wrap around the hoops until October arrives and it's time to put on the plastic. The best part is: the protection is working. Yesterday I watched a squirrel actively looking for a way in, even partially climbing the mesh, then giving up the exercise as fruitless and wandering away.
Malamutes, however, are another matter. Not once, but *twice* has Milady invaded the greenhouse. The first time, she slipped between the hoops and the neighbors chain link fence, pulling open a hole in the mesh. She proceeded to trample through a newly-seeded carrot bed, dig a bit in a lettuce seedling bed, and then apparently tried to exit through the yard side. Judging by the way the netting was ripped and the snap clamps were blown off (the clamps keep the netting attached to the hoops), I think she encountered the net, didn't know what it was, and panicked. Let me tell you, a scared Malamute is *strong*.
I chalked this first transgression up to experimentation and innocence...but the SECOND time it happened, I could see where she had purposefully pulled the metting away from the hoops with her claws, forced her way in (again trampling the carrots) and dug down the lettuce seedlings bed until it could no longer be considered a "raised" bed any longer! My lettuce production then suffered a three-week hiatus because all of my intermediate plants were destroyed utterly. How did I feel about that? Angry wasn't the half of it. Milady earned a quick confinement to her dog run until I figured out how to stop her.
I finally installed a stronger wire fence to prevent her from getting between the greenhouse and the neighbor's chain link fence, and that seems to have done the trick because she hasn't gotten in since. Anyway, the greenhouse is up, just waiting for plastic, and the things inside it like the broccoli and squarshes are going CRAZY. Of course, the greenhouse itself is not responsible for this growth, but soon it will be. I just planted a fall crop of endive, Winter Density Lettuce, and more carrots. Looking forward to adding leeks, mache and other goodness...

Success and Not So Much

Sorry about the long gap in updating. I've been having a fair amount of garden success so far this year. Above is part of one harvest: onions and cilantro (pictured), along with lettuce and baby spinach. Pretty much, we've stopped buying salad fixin's for the foreseeable future. The lettuce, carrots, onions, spinach, garlic, squash, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and raspberries seem to be growing great, BUT...

Those are my strawberries. Note the scale. They're tiny and not all that sweet. I don't know if the rain gutter system I devised doesn't allow good root expansion, or if they needed more fertilizer/compost because they used up what's was present in the shallow trough. On the plus side, the squirrels haven't bothered them (probably because they weren't worth the trouble!).

You win some, you lose some.

Questions from the Studio Audience

A flower-like romaine lettuce plant.

Wow, I see it's been a full week since my last post. Didn't mean for this to be a Sunday blogging thing; will try to do better next week.

At any rate, I received no less than three questions from friends today who were asking me about various gardening-related questions. Apparently, they have me confused with some kind of knowledgeable person, but I answered two of the questions anyway and have done research on the third. I thought others might be curious about similar things, because you know the teacher's adage: if one kid asks a question, that means two others had the same question but were afraid to raise their hands. So, here's what I was asked:

"The seeds I planted said they were spinach, but the things that sprouted up look nothing like what they're supposed to."

Take heart. Everything is proceeding as normal. The first leaves of a seedling are called cotyledons, and are present in the seed before germination. In fact, they contain the stored food reserves of the seed, and can sometimes stay with the maturing plant for some time, or wither soon after the true leaves appear. The true leaves of many plants do not appear until the post-germination phase (meaning after the seedling has sprouted). Shown on the left is a juvenile spinach seedling with both the cotyledons (the long thin leaves) and the first pair of true leaves. Later, the spinach plant will grow and its true leaves will expand to their more familiar shape, and begin to look like the right-hand picture as the plant matures.



"My compost bin smells awful. Is it supposed to do that?"
Sure, that's what's happening to a lot of things while they decompose...remember that "composting" is little more than a euphemism for "rotting." Want your compost bin to not smell? Make sure you have a good mix of  "greens" and "browns." "Greens," or items high in nitrogen, are things like kitchen scraps (remember to keep any dairy or meat products out of your compost mix), grass clippings, coffee grounds, chicken manure, or weeds you've pulled. "Browns," or high-carbon items, are things like straw, dry leaves, dryer lint, shredded paper (avoid colored paper or paper with colored inks), eggshells, coffee husks, etc. The most common culprit for foul-smelling compost is a mixture too high in nitrogen caused by adding too many kitchen scraps without covering them with some kind of carbon or "browns." Also, remember to keep the pile a bit damp--like a wrung-out sponge but not sopping wet--and occasionally add a shovelful of garden dirt. The dirt will add millions of microbial bacteria that are the prime movers in the composting process. When your mix is right, you will find the pile will heat up, sometimes to as high as 140 degrees or more. Today, for example, my bin was steaming in 60-degree weather! This 'hot composting' means your nitrogen/carbon mix is right, and the only thing you will smell is the lovely scent of fresh earth.

"My potatoes are growing and I know I'm supposed to add dirt to them...but how much, and when do I stop adding it?"
The two main things that potatoes hate are inadequate water and excessive soil heat. Both problems can be solved easily, and there are many viable ways to do it. Perhaps the easiest is mulching. When your seedlings first appear from the ground and get a set of true leaves, mulch around them with an inch of compost and then cover the entire bed with a foot of clean straw. The plants will grow right up through it and the soil will stay cooler and retain moisture longer. This method can even be used at planting time; just set the seed potatoes right on the ground, cover with compost and straw, and water well. What could be simpler? Another way is to use a hoe to mound the soil up around the plants every few weeks. Don't worry about covering up the stem and lower leaves; the plant doesn't seem to mind. I've even heard of people who grow potatoes in raised beds using a "potato collar." This is another wooden frame (without a bottom) that sits on top of the raised bed and, in effect, raises it still further. This second bed is then filled with compost and straw, or just plain dirt, and the potatoes keep right on growing. In short, cover them with something to keep the ground moist and cool, and don't stress too much about the particulars.

Gardening like a Mother

Well, actually, gardening with a mother happened today--not my octogenarian mother, of course, but the mother of my kids. Melissa and I were home together and both healthy on a free day with decent weather; a perfect storm that hasn't happened in quite a while. She worked on building out a new flowerbed along the dog run, while I finished building three other vegetable beds and disassembling my drip irrigation system in preparation for installing the greenhouse. Then, Melissa planted a variety of flower seed (specifically designed to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, apparently) while I transplanted cantaloupe, acorn squash, butternut squash, lettuce seedlings, and planted about 15 more onion sets.

Both of us cleaned and straightened the patio within an inch of its life and reorganized where we stored things to make the backyard look a great deal neater and less cluttered. We marveled at how large our patio seemed after all the stuff around the periphery was stowed in more efficient places.

There are still things to do. I need to direct sow many more rows of carrots, and I need to get topsoil to fill one of the new lettuce beds and the second container for my tomato plants, which will probably be filled next week with my six 8" seedlings that are happily growing in the basement. And then there is the weeding, and many things will soon need composting/fertilizing and mulching.

But, a good day!

Still Think Growing Lettuce is a Hassle?

E-Coli in the Lettuce. Again.

This kind of thing comes up about twice a year. Any wonder why I prefer growing lettuce in the backyard?

Of Apples and Crabapples

We've had this poor little crabapple tree on the side of our house since we moved in ten years ago. It's a little thing that looks like it was designed by Dr. Seuss, and we had often talked of getting rid of it. But it's pretty in the spring when it blooms, and now it has another purpose: cross pollination.

You see, apple trees are social creatures, and they need another apple tree--of another variety--to cross pollinate with in order to set the most fruit. Crabapples fill that bill nicely, as long as their blooming cycle is in a congruent time with the other variety.

Several weeks ago we planted a Sweet Sixteen apple tree on a L'il Dwarf rootstock. Because of its size and appearance, we have affectionately dubbed it our "apple stick." But notice the following picture:

Our little seedling is starting to send out leaves from the top and several buds on the side. Don't come looking around here for apples this year (or even next), but I think the tree might take, unless I come too close with the weed trimmer.

State of the Garden

The garden improvements are coming along. I continued making a "channel" or footpath on the east side, both for ease of access and to eventually get to the attachment points for the greenhouse ribs. I consolidated the lettuce into one more densely-packed bed, and put out some more spinach and broccoli transplants. Finally, I direct-sowed some carrots, too...a bit later than I should have, but better late than never.

Let me allow pictures to describe the garden better than I can do with words. First, the general overview:

Then, the spinach. Some new transplants, some older seedlings.

My lettuce, with Red Sails and Green Sails in the foreground, with some Royal Oak Leaf and Buttercrunch more in the background:

A view through the garlic...

The onion sets were put in not long ago, so they're still a bit away from harvesting...

Here's the new northern bed that I narrowed and straightened. The 2"x8" on the left edge is a salvage from my alley that I just got today. I'm making this my main carrot bed, since it gets the most sun. Just planted four short rows today on the north end, and will add more in succession in the weeks to follow.

The broccoli bed that I mentioned building in the last post. The black tubes are drip irrigation lines to water the seedlings. That system will be fairly radically changed as the new greenhouse takes shape.

So there you have it: the state of the Bareford garden on April 20th, 2010!

Rethinking the Garden

I'm a firm believer in garden plans. I've even taught a workshop on how to make a garden plan, and preached the mantra "Make a plan and stick to it. Your premeditated ideas and decisions will almost always be better than your emotional, in-the-moment ones." Hopefully, if you were in that workshop, you weren't listening to that line of bull. Apparently, even I wasn't.

You see, my garden plan is out the window.

The problem began with one innocent tray of lettuce seedlings. This past winter, I was slowly accumulating some equipment necessary to eventually set up an indoor aquaponics ecosystem, and I was testing the grow lights that I had put together, using some leaf lettuce seeds as guinea pigs. They sprouted, but quickly yellowed and just weren't thriving. Because growing plants are a vital link the aquaponics chain, I tinkered around for better results: I changed the grow lights, and made my own potting soil. As a test bed, I scattered a bunch of mixed lettuce seeds in two inches of soil inside an aluminum roasting pan and waited to see what would happen.

Well, they sprouted. All of them. I was happy because my growing setup was working. And then the seedlings were 2-3 inches tall and crowding each other badly. I should have tossed them out; it was only an experiment, right? Of course, I couldn't do that. Instead, I transplanted 18 of them into individual peat pots. And then gave a half-dozen away to one friend, another dozen to a second friend. And then I transplanted another dozen for myself, and still I had more. Did I mention I scattered a bunch of seeds?

So, in March after I built my cold frame, I moved my growing little collection of seedlings outside. Then, once the beds were ready--and the drip irrigation installed--it was just too tempting to wait. I planted my lettuce seedlings where I'd planned to, but also right across the beds that I'd planned for spinach and carrots.

The non-plan problem deepened when my strawberries didn't come up the way I'd hoped, and I moved them to the new rain gutter planters and put broccoli in their place (therefore not putting the broccoli in the bed space I'd planned it to go). Then, after reading Four Season Harvest, Melissa and I have decided to put up a convertible greenhouse over our main garden, which requires space around the edges.

So today, I fully converted the tiered strawberry bed into a fully-enclosed raised bed for the broccoli, and I made a footpath on the west side of spinach, lettuce, and onion beds, even transplanting some plants to do it. It looks great, and it will improve both the look and the usability of the garden.

But now my garden looks almost nothing like the design I crafted last winter, and my plan bears little resemblance to the growing reality behind our house.

Oh well, even architects have their initial blueprints (the way they imagine it) and their as-built drawings (the way the building was actually built). Maybe next year my plan will be better...

Book Review: Four Season Harvest

For my birthday this week, my family gave me a couple of books, including Four Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. The basic premise of the book is that Coleman, a gardener who lives in Maine, grows a kitchen garden and harvests food throughout the year, even during the winter months--and he does it without an expensive, artificially-heated greenhouse! His success is due to a simple formula: plant cold-resistant vegetables, such as spinach, carrots, kale, and mache, and protect them by using simple technologies like a plastic-sheeted hoophouse and the time-honored cold frame. Coleman points out that he is not trying to grow plants during the winter, only to have them available to harvest. Think of it like a large-scale crisper drawer from your refrigerator!

The book has starting Melissa and I seriously thinking about covering our main garden plot with a "convertible" greenhouse. During the warm months, it would be covered with deer netting to keep out squirrels, dogs, rabbits, etc., and as fall and winter approach would be clad with clear plastic sheeting and stocked with cold frames inside to preserve the fall-planted crops for harvesting throughout the year. The price is far less than you might think (the PVC materials to make the ribs of the structure will cost less than $40 total!), and it seems simple to put together.

Stay tuned for more greenhouse information to follow, and hopefully more four-season harvesting, too!

First Harvest

Shown above is our first harvest of the year--a salad of baby greens and spinach that was wonderful when tossed with mozzarella cheese and oil and spices. Of special note is that this harvest is at least six weeks earlier than our first crop last year. This is partly due to the unseasonable warm Spring we've been having, but also to starting seeds earlier and having a better indoor growing setup coupled with an outdoor cold frame to extend the growing season back several weeks.

My goal this year: a four-season harvest! Stay tuned for how we will do it...

Rain Gutter Strawberry Beds

Those humble-looking additions to the souther wall of my house are my new strawberry beds. Like I mentioned in my last post, my old bed wasn't being fully utilized by the plants, so I installed these. There are nothing more than a 10' length of vinyl rain gutter cut into two 5' pieces and secured to the wall. There are drainage holes drilled at intervals along the bottom, which completely wrecks them as actual rain gutters but makes them much better planters.

Now, 17 strawberry plants call these gutters home. We also hope they'll be easier to protect from squirrels and birds, once we overlay them with deer netting. I think slugs or other creepy-crawlies might have a harder time scaling the wall to get at them, too! The best part is, now my strawberry take up absolutely zero "floor space" in my garden and are located in one of the sunniest places in my yard. Hopefully, I'll take pictures of them in coming months, brimming with berries.

On Being Ruthless

Urban gardeners, as a rule, have drastically less space to devote to a garden than people dwelling in suburbs or agrarian areas. Some get by with a raised bed 3' on a side while others have only their windowsills on which to place container plants. I feel blessed to have an 8'x20' area to do my growing; my sister, by comparison, who lives on a rural farm in Washington, has a vegetable garden larger than my entire lot. All this is to say that urban gardeners must be absolutely ruthless when it comes to space. We must covet that empty space in between rows of lettuce seedlings (quick! plant carrots!), replace that harvested plant with a new seedling, and always be assessing if we are using every available square foot in the most efficient way possible.

To that end, Melissa re-examined our garden again tonight and made the ruthless decision to remove our main strawberry bed. Last year, I planted 25 plants in a bed three feet wide by eight feet long, and they did pretty well...until the squirrels ravaged the berry crop. Then in the time-honored tradition of closing the barn door after the horse has fled, I built a frame around the bed and cover the whole thing with netting to keep out the squirrels. When the plants sent out runners I meticulously arranged them and rooted the shoots all around the bed. This fall, I covered the plants in a deep mulch of clean straw, just like you're supposed to. But now, nearing mid-April, only about 15 plants have re-emerged, despite all the time and energy I poured into them.

Twenty-four square feet for 15 plants? Hardly efficient. So, Melissa and I bought a vinyl rain gutter, cut it into two five-foot lengths, and are turning the south wall of our house into a miniature vertical garden. One gutter is up, and hopefully tomorrow I'll get the other hung. Then, I'll dig up the strawberry plants and transplant them into their new home. It's a way to take advantage of hitherto unusable space (the wall) and free up a significant growing area for more efficient use.

So keep turning a critical eye on your garden, and stay ruthless!

It's On!

Despite my earlier dire warning to the contrary, I've started laying in some of my garden. Today saw the planting of 48 yellow onion sets and 28 leaf lettuce seedlings (shown above) that have been out in my cold frame for the past two weeks. If you inspect the picture closely on the right-hand side, you can see one of the drip irrigation lines that water the lettuce bed. Used it in the first this-is-not-a-drill irrigation this afternoon, and it worked liked a charm!

Even my (established) raspberry bush has exploded with greenery. It knows Spring is here! Might we still get some cooler weather? Definitely. But, I've only planted cold-tolerant things at the moment and if a freak cold snap comes up, I can always cloche and row cover to get my tender charges through the night. So damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead!

Drip Irrigation System

This afternoon, in beautiful 80-degree weather, I installed my gravity-fed drip irrigation system. The "sample system" is shown above. It actually went much more smoothly than I expected. Because gravity-fed systems has such low PSI, there are limits to how far a mainline and dripline can run. In this picture, you can see me four primary bed driplines and a couple of my strawberry bed lines. In total, I have 7 lines, each with drip emitters every 12". 

Here is where some of the driplines connect to the mainline:

Connecting them was so simple! Using the provided punch, you make a hole in the mainline where you want the dripline to come off, then use a two-way barb to connect the mainline to the dripline. Add a plug at the other end of the dripline, and you're done. The system works perfectly, and gets equal flow on all seven lines. It's magic.

Becausee the drip emitters are so small, clogging could be an issue, so there's a filter between the rain barrel and the lines. Here's a photo that shows the filter and shutoff valve hooked to the barrel:

So, the plan is to keep the rain barrel on the garden cart, above, and mostly keep it hooked to the downspout. When it's time to water, I just pull the cart over to the garden, connect up the hose, and turn it on! This system waters about half of my garden. I have leftover mainline and driplines that I will probably set up for the other half, though I'll probably have to buy a couple more pieces to make the second system operational. But, for a net cost of $35, this will save a lot of time!

Calling My Bluff

Sometimes, gardening is easy (after all, we live in the Midwest). I throw some lettuce seeds or carrot seeds into the ground, water them occasionally, and soon have a bumper crop. It's easy to think I'm getting pretty good at this gardening stuff. And then I order something that calls my bluff.

Grow that, garden boy!


Henry Field's Seed Company tells me those sticks are a Sweet Sixteen apple tree on a dwarf rootstock and three red raspberry plants. Sure they are. Don't come to me for your apple pie or raspberry jam this year. Or next year either, I suspect. If I can actually get fruit and berries from these sticks, then I might start to think I'm a capable gardener. 


Or not.

Don't Do It. Yes, that means you. You, too.

Well, it's officially Spring, and the weather here in the Windy City has been hitting the 50s or 60s, which makes urban gardeners (myself included) eye our budding seedlings and start champing at the bit to let the planting begin.

Danger, danger, Will Robinson! (Did I just date myself there?)


Remember, our last frost date is between April 25th and May 1st here in Chicago. We got a frost last night. This past weekend, it snowed. Last year, we got a significant snowfall on April 5th. It ain't over yet, folks. If you moved your tender seedlings outdoors, the worst case scenario is that there will be one or more hard frosts that will kill everything you just planted. The best case scenario is that through a lot of worried studying of weather reports, diligent covering and uncovering the young plants, and a streak of luck, your seedlings might survive the transition from inside your house to the nascent Spring...but their "headstart" in growth will quickly vanish compared to later-planted seedlings. Why? Because even plants that can survive cold weather don't do much--or any--growth when the mercury is low. Your lawn is a good example. It's probably not totally brown and dead, but how many times did you mow it this Winter? Yeah, I thought so.

But I know you. You've read up on your plants and noticed that some plants like spinach and lettuce do okay in cooler temps, so you want to move them outside--possibly to reclaim that window ledge that had been overwhelmed by plants. Go ahead and move them outside if you must, but do it in stages...

It's called "hardening" the seedlings.


Find a shadier place that's sheltered from the wind. If you have a cold frame, then--duh--use that. Leave the plants out only for a few hours a day before bringing them back inside. Gradually, over the course of a week or even two, increase how long the seedlings are outside and how much sunlight they're getting. I like to end this process by placing them for a day or two (still in their containers) on top of the place in the garden that will become their permanent This process will greatly reduce transplant shock, give you healthier plants, and at least make you feel like you're getting something done.

Take the time. You (and your vegetables) will be glad you did.

Poor Man's Drip Irrigation

Ah, the two liter soda bottle: is there any problem it can't solve? This week's repurposing of our time-honored refreshment container is for drip irrigation. Drip irrigation, to review, is simply the art of delivering water slowly, right where your plants need it, with as little possible wasted to evaporation and none given as free nourishment to weeds.  Note: This kind of "system" is better to install before you transplant those delicate little seedlings or sow those tiny rows of seeds.

Take some 2-liter soda bottles and remove the labels. I guess it isn't strictly necessary, but it does make them look neater and keeps my blog from encountering any awkward product placement issues. Next, find a small but sturdy pin. I used a thumbtack. Poke a series of holes all around the bottle. I did about 2 dozen. When you fill it with water, it will look like this:

Now, bury in your planting area. Some people cut off the bottom and plant them upside down, but I find too much garden and soil debris falls into the bottle, and things like mosquitoes use the water for breeding...not good. I bury them right side up, leaving only the top neck of the bottle exposed, or at least no more than a few inches. Then I plant within about four inches of the bottle on all sides.

When you are ready to water, simply open up the cap, fill with water, and re-close. The bottle will slowly drain and the water will seep slowly and deeply into the ground, without worry of evaporation loss.

This technique is great with square-foot gardening, or with containers, which tend to dry out quickly. Give it a try!