Small-Space Vegetable Gardens: Growing Great Edibles in Containers, Raised Beds, and Small Plots

by Andrea Bellamy

Overview

“Size matters! Andrea Bellamy shares creative ways to grow a wide array of vegetables, fruits, and herbs in diminutive settings, year-round.” —Debra Prinzing, author, speaker, and podcaster

Small-Space Vegetable Gardens explains the basics of growing a bounty of edibles in a minimal amount of space. Andrea Bellamy shares all the knowledge she’s gained from years of gardening small. You’ll learn how to find and assess a space, how to plan and build a garden, and how to sow, grow, and harvest the 60 best edible plants. This hardworking and enthusiastic guide will help you take advantage of the space you have—whether it’s a balcony, a patio, a plot in a community garden, or even a small yard—to create the food garden of your dreams.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781604695472
Publisher:	Timber Press, Incorporated
Publication date:	12/31/2014
Pages:	216
Sales rank:	389,784
Product dimensions:	8.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Andrea Bellamy is the creator of Heavy Petal, a blog devoted to urban organic gardening. She has a certificate in garden design from the University of British Columbia and studied permaculture methods for food production at an urban microfarm. She has been gardening since childhood and has grown food on rooftops, balconies, boulevards, and patios, and in community garden beds, window boxes, traffic circles, frontyards, and backyards. She is the Grow Food columnist for Edible Vancouver magazine, and her writing has appeared in a number of online and print publications. She lives in Vancouver, Canada, with her husband and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

Preface
All around us, a movement is taking place. People are rigging up window boxes for growing herbs, making room on the fire escape for a pot of tomatoes, renovating neglected flowerbeds to make way for raspberries and rhubarb, and convincing landlords to turn over a few square feet of lawn for food production. Families are joining waitlists for community garden plots, signing up for canning workshops, and getting to know their local growers at the farmers’ market.

The economy, self-sufficiency, sustainability, taste, health—whatever your reasons, it is always a good time to grow your own organic food. And you can do it, no matter how small your gardening space.

I grow food for all these reasons, but most of all I do it because it feels great. I love working outside and getting my hands dirty. I love connecting with other gardeners and sharing seeds and ideas. And I love harvesting something I have grown and eating it fresh that night for dinner. Yes, it is local food—really local food. But mainly it’s just good food.

For me, gardening has been a lifelong obsession and an experiment in trial and error. Lots of error. And, believe it or not, that is something I love about growing food—it keeps me on my toes. Just when I think I’ve finally mastered this urban farming thing, nature proves me wrong. The key, I think, is to pay attention—to celebrate each perfect potato, learn from mistakes, and, above all, enjoy the process.

This book walks you through the basics—and then some—of planning, creating, and tending an organic food garden in a small space. This is the book I wish I’d had when I was a new gardener, and I hope it will be a helpful resource and an inspiration to you. Most of all, I hope you get hooked on gardening and growing your own good food.
 

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
 
One: Finding Space
 
Two: Assessing Your Space
 
Three: Design in a Small Area
 
Four: Planning for Planting           
 
Five: Building your Garden           
 
Six: Optimizing Your Soil                
 
Seven: Sowing and Growing         
 
Eight: Keeping Plants Healthy      
 
Nine: Making the Most of Limited Space
 
Ten: Harvesting and Preparing for Next Year
 
Edibles from A to Z          
 

Editorial Reviews

11/17/2014
This handy volume dispels the notion that raised-bed gardens and container gardening are for amateurs. To the contrary, Bellamy (Sugar Snaps and Strawberries) makes the case that small-scale gardening offers the opportunity to experience the fullness of horticultural possibility in defined and proportionate spaces. Through charts, illustrations, and to-do lists, she demonstrates that container gardens are just the right size to be manageable and to explore the entire cycle of gardening, from seed to harvest. Beginning with the rudimentary aspects of the nature of soil, the usefulness of mulch, and the making of compost, she explains the unique conditions for starting seeds and, later, for plant maintenance, including guidelines about watering. From there, post-harvest, the section on saving and storing seeds and propagating can encourage the gardener to keep the garden going perpetually. Finally, at season’s end, when all is harvested and seeds stored, the section on winter protection and cleaning tools brings the process full circle. Bellamy has written an inspiring and practical guide to sprouting life in the nooks and corners of unused land. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

Size matters! Andrea Bellamy shares creative ways to grow a wide array of vegetables, fruits, and herbs in diminutive settings, year-round.” —Debra Prinzing, author, speaker, podcaster, and contributing editor to Country Gardens 
 
“A must-have handbook for edible gardeners! Bellamy shows us that small can be beautiful and productive.” —Willi Galloway, award-winning writer, radio commentator, and author of Grow, Eat, Cook: A Food Lover’s Guide to Vegetable Gardening
 
“With Andrea’s expert guidance, see how easy it is to tend vegetables, fruit, and herbs right outside your back door.” —Dee Nash, author of The 20–30 Something Garden Guide

“Bellamy provides an A–Z (apples to zucchini) guide to edibles and many ancillary sources of information, all accompanied by delightful illustrations and scrumptious color photographs to create a one-stop guide to vegetable gardens sure to encourage and please many aspiring and veteran gardeners.” —Booklist
 
“A comprehensive guide to starting out when space in your garden is limited.” —Gardens Illustrated
 
“This hardworking and enthusiastic guide teaches gardeners how to take advantage of the space they have to create the food garden of their dreams.” —Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland
 
“This guide to urban vegetable growing provides insight into how to make the most of any space, no matter how small. Answering all the questions you’ve ever had about urban vegetable growing. . . . Small-Space VegetableGardens is a great beginners guide for anyone who doesn’t think urban living means you have to miss out on home-grown produce.” —Landlove

From the Publisher

"This hardworking and enthusiastic guide teaches gardeners how to take advantage of the space they have to create the food garden of their dreams.

Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland

This guide to urban vegetable growing provides insight into how to make the most of any space, no matter how small. Answering all the questions you've ever had about urban vegetable growing...Small-Space VegetableGardens is a great beginners guide for anyone who doesn't think urban living means you have to miss out on home-grown produce.” 

Landlove

A comprehensive guide to starting out when space in your garden is limited.”

Gardens Illustrated

A one-stop guide to vegetable gardens sure to encourage and please many aspiring and veteran gardeners.” 

Booklist

"With Andrea's expert guidance, see how easy it is to tend vegetables, fruit, and herbs right outside your back door."

Dee Nash

"A must-have handbook for edible gardeners! Bellamy shows us that small can be beautiful and productive."

Willi Galloway

"Size matters! Andrea Bellamy shares creative ways to grow a wide variety of vegetables, fruits, and herbs in diminutive settings, year-round."

Debra Prinzing

"If I could recommend one book for small-space vegetable gardening, this would be it. Andrea Bellamy nailed it!"

Joe Lamp'L

12/01/2014
The growing interest in tending edibles in tight spots leaves both new and seasoned gardeners with a need for guidance on fostering food and plants within nontraditional spaces, such as in balcony containers or in beds perched on rooftops. While the body of gardening materials available today is not lacking in titles focusing on spatial constraints, what differentiates Bellamy's (Sugar Snaps and Strawberries: Simple Solutions for Creating Your Own Small-Space Edible Garden) latest is its organizational structure and magazinelike feel, which make it a hybrid of an "idea book" and a strong survey of the craft of small-space gardening. Organic techniques are encouraged by nature, rather than as a means of marketing. Full-color, annotated photographs provide inspiration and illustration while concise, well-written text offer instruction. The book culminates in a directory of fruits and vegetables, including each plant's scientific name, a color photo, and growing and harvesting information. Although the title lacks a list of further reading to provide its audience with a springboard, there is a bibliography, a metric conversion chart, and an index. VERDICT Recommended for readers interested in gardening on a smaller scale or growing food where lack of physical space is challenging.—Nerissa Kuebrich, Chicago

Library Journal