Gardening in small spaces....

     So we planted a garden this year. As we are renting and cannot tear out any of the grass we used pots and had to get creative. We made a hanging garden out of large water bottles with herbs, peppers, tomatoes and one bottle of wild flowers. We planted 2 varieties of cherry tomatoes and one orange blaze peppers upside down, then the herbs right side up in bottles hung sideways. We had several types of basil (from seeds) and three types of mints (from seedlings). All the herbs did quite well, we used some fresh to make tea and to add mint to our chocolate shakes and we are drying a lot of herbs in the basement. The tomatoes and peppers (all seedlings from the nursery) did not so great, we got a few from each but I think they needed more root space, maybe we'll use five gallon buckets with a hole cut in the bottom next time.
      In the pots on the porch we did zucchini and water melon from seeds and green peppers and cayenne peppers from the nursery. (we also had some beans and peas that gave us a few before we pulled them to make more room for other things). The watermelons have done alright, we got one very sweet but small melon and one more we'll pick soon. The zucchini did pretty well, and gave us quite a few. The green peppers have also done pretty well. The cayenne peppers took their time to come along, but we are getting a ton of those right now, so far we have made some very spicy homemade salsa (next time we'll use just one instead of three). And we use the green peppers in all sorts of things. I think we will still get quite a few green peppers, a ton of cayenne peppers, a couple zucchini and the one more water melon. But we lost most of the hanging garden due to wind in the last storm.
     It's been fun, Isaac has really enjoyed it and is excited to do a bigger garden next year, which we are thinking we'll do mostly peppers (since that's what we like and use the most and they seem to do well here) maybe zucchini again and probably add onions.