Container Gardening on the South Deck

Image by marfis75 via Flickr

Strawberries ready to pick.

May is Strawberry Month

Container Gardening Project:
Strawberry Towers


Summer time is a great time to relax and enjoy your outdoor decks and patios. Here is a project that will add flavor and smiles to your outdoor living spaces.

On the south side of our house, visible through the glass doors in the music room, is our deck. It's a nice sturdy wood deck, about 14 X 14 feet, and stained a light bluish gray to coordinate with the gray of our house siding. There are solar powered lights installed on the rail caps at the top of the stairway, which leads out to our kitchen garden and the gazebo. On cool spring and sunny winter days I like to sit at the top of the steps to gather the warmth and sunshine that gives our music room the solar gain that keeps it warm and comfortable on those chilly days. While I sit there, I envision how the deck will be set up for the summer and early fall months and I begin to plan the projects that will add value to those warmer days and allow us to spend more time on the deck.




Hot and Uncomfortable for all but the Wasps

When it gets warm enough in early spring, I remove the holiday decorations and re-string some white LED lights under the railings of our deck and porches, put out the patio furniture and begin to add some plants in small pots and hanging bags.  The south-facing deck however, doesn't get used much in the heat of the summer. On a cloudless day, the sun shines directly on it for most of the day. With little shade from the nearby trees it becomes too hot to use. Also, it is not in close proximity to the kitchen, so having breakfast or lunch on the deck before the heat sets in, means hauling plates and food across the yard or through the house. Add to that, the south deck is also a favorite place for yellow jackets to sun themselves. Nothing less than sunglasses and ice tea are required to survive being seared if you're there in the heat of the day, with checking the rim and top of your glass of tea for wasps, a necessity.

Looking for Cool

This spring, my thoughts turned to adding vertical gardening containers to the deck that would add cool green vegetation and help to reduce the reflective heat from the deck floor and house walls. I did not want a hodgepodge of pots and plastic food buckets, or overflowing containers of dirt and straggly plants, so I spent some time in research and purchased containers that were pleasing to the eye and very functional.

The next step would be to plan what to place in those pots and how to maintain my on-deck garden. The pots that I chose ranged from window boxes, to stacking pots, to large terra cotta colored boxes with attached wheels and trellis'. My idea was to add edible, vining plants, along with salad greens and fragrant flowers. Some of the plants that I considered were peas, early in the season, with vining tomatoes, nasturtiums, muskmelon and sweet peas. Radishes, spinach and lettuces to start the early season and towers and towers of strawberries.

Gold Mine Find of the Day!

Towers of strawberries, cascading out of stacked pots, ready to be picked and savored. Wondrous red fruit whose look, smell and flavor was the epitome of warm summer days. Even the thought holds memories of picnics at Gordon Lake and Copper Falls State Park, laying out in the hay field with my bucket full of tiny wild fruits plucked from under tiny leaves that hid in tall grasses, that grew in our hay fields. Just watching white puffy clouds float by while the red gems danced on my tongue.

I had a large strawberry patch a few years back, here at Dragn Rock. 150 plants, all nicely hilled, ready for mulching with straw or woodchips. It lasted a day, maybe two, then my partner took out the tractor and the new plow that hooked to the back and plowed them all under. He did not know they were just planted and thought that he was helping me get the garden ready for ....planting strawberries. Cest la vie - such is life.

Thinking about stacking pots and all those strawberries, I priced out different styles and sizes and found that for the price, I wasn't getting much. Then I found some great stacking pots at the local Goodwill store for a very reasonable price and bought enough to make two complete sets of stacking pots that would each hold 15 strawberry plants and a couple of cascading rosemary plants. I purchased some ogalalla strawberries, some potting mix and cedar mulch and put those towers into play.

Picture Gallery of the Tower Assembly

The following is a set of pictures to show the assembly and planting of my two strawberry towers that now grace the south deck and are leafing out nicely....

Set of five stacking pots, each able to hold three
strawberry plants or other plants. Herbs and succulents
are also a great idea.

Each of the stacking pots has a round area that sticks out from the center. The pots have molded slots in the bottom of each so that they lock into place on the top of another pot. Each has three holes in the inner section that allow for water to drain down into the pot below. If you want to add room between the bottom of the pot and your deck floor - for good drainage and to minimize water damage to your deck, place round landscape bricks under each of the three 'petals'. This will allow the water to drain through and out.

This is how the stacking pots look when assembled.
You can make them as high as you want,
but the higher they are, the more they can tip
in bad weather.

I placed a small patch of black landscape in the bottom of each pot, then a thin layer of perlite for drainage. I used Miracle Grow potting mix - the organic kind - with some extra perlite and peat moss added. I created small mounds of the mix in each petal and place a strawberry plant on each mound, making sure to spread the roots out around the mound. Then I added more soil, covering the roots, but leaving the crown of the plant above the soil. To top it off, I added a cedar mulch, as much for looks as to keep the soil moist. Then I took the pots out to the deck and assembled them.

Pots being assembled, mulch added and then watered.

To add something extra to the towers, I added a small solar powered LED lamp to the center of each. Later when the weather is warmer, I will add the cascading rosemary.  Ta Da - The finished product:

You can just barely see the green shoots in the new
strawberry plants. At the time of this writing, the
plants each have at least three nice sized leaves.

Plans for Bigger and Better Projects

Well, I guess that is a start to make my south deck green and more pleasant. I will report on the progress - and how good all those strawberries taste - at a later time.  For my next projects I tackled moving an old ugly compost pile to three much better looking new compost bins, added several potato towers to the kitchen garden and added five Earthboxes to my south deck garden.  More on these later.

Peace
Marlene Hobart
Dragn Rock Farm

Related articles

• 8 Reasons for Vertical Gardening (urbangardensolutions.wordpress.com)
• Wasp and Yellow Jackets Are Some Of The Good Guy's (survivalfarm.wordpress.com)
• Self Watering Containers (survivingthemiddleclasscrash.wordpress.com)