Most people tend to picture vegetable gardens as sprawling plots of land with rows stretching 15 feet or more. Growing vegetables in a container or limited space seems foreign to many.
Growing vegetables in a small space is not only possible, but very rewarding as well. You can grow tomatoes in pots on the edge of your patio, watermelons alongside your driveway or beans on a trellis on your apartment’s balcony.
A space the size of a card table can provide an ample supply of vegetables. The trick is creating a garden that has the right conditions to thrive, and choosing seeds that are suited to being grown in a smaller area.
Many seed companies have started offering miniature, compact plants to meet the needs of people with limited space. You’ll often find them in their catalogs or on their websites under categories like space miser, midgets or space savers.
Vegetables are a different beast, however. Plants like heathers, rhodos and miniature bulbs are grown for decorative reasons in most cases.
Vegetables are grown not to reward the eye so much as the taste buds. So while you might find corn stalks and bean bushes in the average vegetable garden, they’re not a common sight in a well designed landscape garden.
The biggest challenge with a small vegetable garden is practicality. Some vegetables such as lettuce will grow fine with only 4 hours of sunlight a day, but anything that produces a fruit (tomatoes, corn, beans, etc.) needs a solid 8 hours of direct sunlight or they aren’t going to be very productive. That sunlight isn’t necessary for dwarf azaleas, however.
Similarly, a friable soil mix, amply fertilized, is desirable in vegetable growing but too heady for many dwarf plants that are expected to stay small. The major problem, however, is presented by the need to turn over the vegetable garden’s soil every year, in effect reconstituting it; such heavy tilling cannot be done in a bed of rock garden plants and perennials. In most cases, a vegetable patch must be sited differently and separated from the conventional small-scale garden.
This said, there is no doubting the fact that the smaller vegetables are worth trying, especially if space for the larger kind is at a premium. It is important to choose, however, the kind of smallness desired, whether it is the fruit or produce itself that will be miniature, or the plant that yields it. Miniature vegetables as such are amusing and eye-catching, a novelty that many restaurants and imaginative cooks offer with great success. Some miniatures, for example, cherry tomatoes, are accepted for their own sake, while a number of vegetables are of course just naturally small – radishes, for example.
