Container Gardening

The kids, dogs, and gardens post got me thinking. We have a big deck that gets sun, but not much actual dirt that gets any. I tried growing greens and some peas in the strip of dirt that's there, but nothing really did all that great. I did do tomatoes and tried bush cucumbers, also some peppers, in containers and they came out ok. I am really interested in expanding to more stuff in container gardening, but short on details.

I've heard of growing potatoes in garbage bags , any one done this?

How deep do raised boxes need to be for kale and chard if the boxes are placed on a cement deck. How about carrots, beets, etc. Could you do this in a fairly short, box, or does it need to be over 12 inches deep?

Is there a good way to keep the moisture from watering off of the deck surface - tarps, plastic, etc. or will this prevent adequate draining?

Finally, is there a rough estimate of how heavy dirt is? Kind of a silly question, and obviously dependent on how wet the dirt is, but important for figuring out where to put a bigger container. I don't want to break my deck.

Lots of questions... maybe the Sepp Holzer presentation will answer these.

"Fresh Food from Small Spaces" - great book on this topic

Thanks I'll check it out.

The holzer presentation won't cover this, but holzer has done a lot of interesting work in the space of urban permaculture.

Container gardening is something I did a lot of when I lived in the university neighborhood about 15 years ago. Moderately labor intensive. It can be done, and there are a lot of fascinating things in that space.

A bit more on this topic can be found here.

When it comes to limited space for planting we like the "Square foot Gardening", not exactly a container gardening book but great ideas that you can apply to container gardening.

As for spuds in a barrel, I did see it done in a report on "Gardening with Cisco" on the Seattle news.
I wonder if you looked online for archives maybe you could find the footage?

Any body using those up side down hanging tomato containers??

We are having trouble with the soil & roots getting to hot in the sun, any ideas?

So today I made jackets for our up side down planters out of that silver bubble insulation. I'm hoping that this will keep the roots cooler.

What is the best method for watering container tomatoes?