THE Prepping thread - a new beginning :)

I can't start my garden until mid/end May, so am sitting drooling over plant sites now. I will grow the dreaded GREEN STUFF because it's handy for soup. Maybe some leeks, maybe some syboes.

mrsL

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

me too. I`m not going to edit, everyone deserves a laugh

Thanks for not editing it away, kittie, sprouting alpacas is such a darling idea and has me grinning from ear to ear.

Cappella, I am sorry to hear that the feller and the pooch are not well atm, sending all good wishes for their recovery and we'll be here when you need us. I also enjoy your posts.

fuddle, I've successfully grown runner beans in those black plastic plant pots, the bucket type ones, got mine cheaply from morries years ago. Used a screw-eye in the yard's brick wall and ran strings up it, anchored the other end of the strings into the pot with tent pegs. It worked in a pocket-hanky back yard. This space was a sliver of concrete with a brick wall down one side and a block wall of a garage on the other, and had a linen line slung across the middle.

To give an idea of the (lack of) space, you had to fold a double sheet into quarters lengthwise before pegging it out or it's billow into one wall or the other.

Seconding the idea of shelves across windows, I have seen this successfully done many a time. If you can, get glass shelves with rounded edges and mount them across the window. This gives a lot of growing space and an attractive alternative to curtains, particularly if what's on the other side of the window is as lovely as my old view (the bins, basically).:rotfl:

Hopefully your yard is more sheltered that my old one, as it used to develop a wind vortex when the wind was blowing hard enough in certain quarters which could be ...... interesting with the pots. We never did find the blue plastic clamshell top off the sandpit and we looked over a substantial chunk of the neighbourhood.:p

I've sometimes thought about this in relation to traffic, fuddle. My allotment is between a housing estate and a common, inside the city limits. It isn't that there's nose-to-tail traffic sat stationary immediately beside it, but there's enough pollution around.

But farmland is also in the same places as roads, so if you'd eat farm produce via the supermarkets without fretting if the exact field-of-origin was near a main road or not, perhaps it's not really too relevent to worry about the road outside your house. That's my take on it, anyway.

As to theft, I wouldn't put stuff like soft fruits or very easily-recognisable things like peas or beans out there, but you could be artful with some other veg.

F'rinstance, if you sow things almost as if they were bedding plants they'd not scream out that they were veggies. You could, just as an example, make a bed and edge it with those pretty frilly purple lettuces like Lollo Rosso, harvest them alternately, and still have them looking ornamental. You could also grow carrots in shapes where their ferny top-growth could mix in with other plants of the ornamental nature. Herbs are pretty easy to grow, expensive for what you get in the shops and add a lot of flavour and nutrients to your cooking, so perhaps that would be an option? They're mostly pretty unassuming lookers and I doubt many people will notice them lurking in flowerbeds.

If you're discreet about doing this, and discreet about harvesting, folks won't necessarily know you are growing veggies, there's a surprising degree of innocence about plant life and plenty of folks don't know or care what common plants look like.

You might want to treat your front garden as an exercise in guerilla gardening and see how many things you can grow which mingle with ornamentals and don't advertise themselves. HTH.

Thank you, you've both given me a new idea to research. Suddenly garden planning is that bit more exciting.

Is it possible, do you think, to grow elder but keep it in check sizewise while still enabling it to produce berries?