Space Saving Garden Ideas

The ingenuity of some people never fails to amaze me.  At my home, I only have 1/5th of an acre of property.  While I long for 4 or 5 acres, that probably will never happen, so I have to do the best I can with what I have.  Gardening on a space that small sure is challenging.  So while searching for some interesting material for the blog, I went to a favorite blog of mine call gardenrant.com to see what was going on over there.  There is always a lot of info on that blog, but it was a picture that caught my eye.  It was a picture of the garden of someone named Emily Goodman.  She lived in an apartment with a paved over courtyard, but she still managed to grow an edible garden.  They found pictures of her garden on Flickr, which is somewhere I never thought to look for gardening inspiration. 

She did all of the usual things you do in a small garden like using pots and containers for edibles and she even re-purposed some items for use in her garden.  She was growing tomatoes upside down, hanging pots on her fence and using and file cabinet drawers to grow herbs in.  But what caught my eye was her strawberry towers. 

That's right. Strawberry towers.   PVC pipes with strawberries in them.   Two large pieces of it with holes drilled up and down the length of it and were filled with dirt and planted with strawberries.    Kind of a new take on the old strawberry pots.  These strawberry towers were as tall as her fence and looked like they held several dozen strawberry plants in each tower.  Now that is really clever because as we all know, strawberries take up a fair about of space in a garden.  I just might have to give this a try in my own garden. It is like the old saying, "If you can't go out, go up." As I looked around Flickr more, I came across several other variations of this and it seems to be to be a quite logical way to grow strawberries in a small space. 

 As someone who would love to grow enough strawberries to not only make jam with, but to freeze for year round use, this is an enticing idea because I just don't have the space to grow that many strawberries in traditional beds. I think this fall as I get the garden ready for winter, I will have to give this a try and do some strawberry transplanting!   So if you are going past my house one day and see PVC pipes springing up out of the garden, don't be surprised!