Window-box Allotment
A beginner's guide to container gardening

Published by Ebury Press/Random House

What is the point of growing vegetables, fruit and spice which can be bought more cheaply, and without wasting time, from a supermarket?
      The point is this:
a) what will you do with that hoarded time? and
b) what cannot be bought, yet, from greengrocer or supermarket is the pleasure, satisfaction, interest, anticipation in waiting for and looking after something the size of a speck of dust, which can be blown away by a sneeze, but contains within it leaves, stems, scent, flowers, fruit, colour, sap - and yet more seeds. This is the real harvest.

Reviews

Window boxes don't insist on being planted with petunias, geraniums and dusty rags of trailing ivy. They make equally good homes for vegetables and fruit. Growing now in cold January, in window boxes, pots and hanging baskets on my west-facing, 16 x 9 ft (4.9 x 2.7m) London roof garden are Swiss chard, frizzy endive, pak choi, perpetual spinach, lamb's lettuce, garlic chives, rocket, mitsuba (a type of Japanese parsley), celeriac, winter purslane and curly leaf parsley. There will be much more later in the year, such as dwarf beans, alpine strawberries, tomatoes, 'Salad Bowl' lettuce and aubergines. Most of the vegetables growing now were sown last spring and autumn, except for the spinach and Swiss chard, which were sown two years ago.

Almost everyone can have a miniature allotment. Young, small hands and elderly, stiff hands can 'dig' (or trowel-dig) compost that is only a few inches deep. For those who cannot see, window boxes and pots are easy for fingers to 'walk' over and examine. They're also good for backs that can't and backs that can bend; for those who find sitting ( especially in a wheelchair) easier; and for those who prefer kneeling or standing. And for people who live in window ledge-less flats, there is seed-sprouting to try (see pages 186-194). Only a small investment is needed - hardly an overdraft - and this can be made month by month.

Both people without and people with gardens can enjoy window-box gardening because it is quite different from 'garden gardening'. Unless you're a snail or a worm, you can't see seeds sprouting: the eyes are too far away from the ground. But containers can be placed at eye-level and are on a small scale. Because such gardening is intimate, you are more a part of it and can observe more of what is going on, particularly through a magnifying glass: the cucumber slowly fattening and lengthening, the alpine strawberry flower mysteriously changing into fruit. Although it is small, the enjoyment, interest and enrichment it produces are great.

I am not a horticulturist, just an enthusiastic beginner. What follows are not intended to be dictatorial directions, but simply suggestions, which may be followed, partly followed or ignored.

***

The days are getting lighter by a minute a day, or so says the weekend edition of The Times. The lid of darkness is being raised, fractionally, and with it our expectation. The following is a sample of a seed-sowing diary written last year when growing tomatoes for the first time:

Day 1. A packet of tomato seeds: so light in weight there's no castanet-rattle when they're shaken. Yet these dust-size specs (assisted by the four elements) contain potential stems, scent, leaves, pollen, colour, root and rootlets, taste, flesh, sap, flowers, texture, fruit, juice and yet more seeds for next year's harvest: they contain the future - something which should never be taken for granted. An electric propagator: it is seed-tray in size, attached by a cord to a plug, has a greenhouse-like top with ventilation slides and fits on a bedroom window sill. Compost: moist, warmish in its plastic sack and fine; I'd be perfectly content to germinate in this comfortable looking soil. Fingers are sifted through it - like making short-crust pastry. The tray is filled to the brim, levelled, then firmed down with a presser board which resembles a wooden palm on the surface of the soil. Take a pinch of the fragile, fly-away seeds and scatter them from above. If two or more insist on lying together, coax them apart - a finger-tip away from each other. Between the palms, a rain of 1/4 inch (10mm) of compost is sifted, then gently pressed down. Greenhouse cover is placed on top, 'electric blanket' switched on, propagator put on the window-sill and the curtain a quarter drawn to shade tray from too much light. This compost bed is made with more care than one makes one's own.

After sowing, the now invisible seeds are left alone in their centrally heated 'greenhouse'. It is a time to wait.

Wake up in the night to see if tiny orange thermostat light is on. Wonder what is silently and mysteriously taking place in the soil - or perhaps not so silently if one could really hear: the sound of seed cases splitting open.

Day 2, morning. Greenhouse top is misted and sweating. Peer through the misting to see if anything is happening. It isn't - visibly.

Day 5, early morning. Faint eruptions have appeared on the soil surface,which could have been made by tentative moles.

Day 5, later in the day. Mole-eruptions have become larger and are now miniature earthquakes, as the thin-as-hair stems push upwards, heads still underground.

Day 5, evening. Heads are still buried, arched stems resembling croquet hoops on a lawn.

Day 5, midnight. Croquet hoops no longer there. During only a few hours, the heads have risen, breaking out of their seed coats and are now upright, two-leafed. What force is needed, first, to create the eruption upheavals in the compost and, second, to raise the fragile stems from horizontal to vertical?

Day 6, a.m. Greenhouse top is removed. Seedlings lean away from room towards window, leaves outstretched horizontally like a troupe of gymnasts.

Day 6, 9 p.m. Leaves raised upwards, folded together - like gymnasts exercising.

Day 7, morning. Turn tray round so that leaning-towards-light seedlings can straighten their stems.

Day 7, evening. All stems are straight. After a few more window-sill days in the sun with the curtain protecting them at night from the open window's air - it is time for them to go outside. First into a miniature 'greenhouse' (i.e. a large plastic cloche), but only for the choicest slice of the day - its middle. Then back they come in the late afternoon. In and out they go each morning and evening. All of the seed packet's promised contents have germinated. All thirty stems are now protected by the finest, fur-like hairs - vertical halos when seen against the light. Only a few are late beginners, handicapped by seed cases that remain clamped to their two leaves, preventing them from opening. It is tempting to assist and release them, but more interesting to resist and see how the struggling leaves manage to free themselves It is time to do a little judicious thinning-out of seedlings that are growing too close together, endangering each other. Now's the moment to test whether they already smell or taste of tomato? They don't, neither stem nor leaves. But then the shape of the first two seed leaves gives no hint of what they are going to become - unlike basil at the same age. Long before basil seedlings are 'large enough to handle' they are imbued with the clove-ish spiciness of their future.

Day 11. Third leaf is preparing to appear. It is triple-, not single-, lobed, even in infancy, and this is the first sign of the tomato plant it is going to become. Does this first visual indication also hold the identifying smell and taste? No. Still it releases no scent.

Day 12. Although the tomato seedlings are still too fragile to be watered from above, even with a fine rose spray, they are now sturdy enough to stand up for themselves against breezes, trembling only slightly without toppling over. Watering is done with narrowest watering-can spout, dribbled on to compost in which desert-like cracks have appeared.

Seed sowing must be one of the most absorbing of occupations. It is not only the actual doing of it, but also the anticipation, the anxieties and thoughts surrounding it ... imagining what is going on inside the seed tray, as the white galaxy of fragile roots spreads through the dark earth.

I rush back early from a party to close the window and rescue the tomato seedlings from an unexpected drop in temperature.

Day 18. This is pricking-out day - the move from tray to individual pots. Fill 3 1/2 inch (9 cm) pots with compost. Using both thumbs, make a hole in the centre - like making a clay pinch-pot - to receive the plant and its roots. Scoop out a heaped dessertspoonful of chocolate-coloured cake compost in centre of which is a small giraffe-like creature with its long, furry neck-stem and white spider's-web roots. Place in hole. One by one the pots line up. Glance down and notice that the first of the transplants is drooping; prop it up with pea-size piece of compost. Only a few minutes later, in the time it took to make a cup of coffee, panic! All fifteen seedlings are drooping - sulking in unison. Race at ambulance speed to place the fifteen casualties ankle-deep in a trough of water. Wait for the first signs of recovery, and discover the compost bag's planting instructions: the pots should have been watered before, not after, pricking out. It is touch and go. After what seems a long time, but is in fact short for stems and leaves to rise from facing the earth to facing the sky, the panic is over. First whole night in the 'greenhouse'.

Day 19. Before breakfast, raise cloche to see how seedlings have fared in their pots. All are flourishing.

Day 22. Fifth leaf appearing. Seedlings are now stocky enough to be watered from above with a fine rose spray. Stems are thickening. Fur-like stem hairs stop at the two first leaves, then the fur thins out, becoming more hair-like - fine barbed wire to deter insects perhaps.

Day 25. Three-lobed leaves are now resilient enough for raindrops to balance and perch without toppling them. When all twenty-nine seedlings are flourishing with four or five leaves, the last of the late-beginner's first two leaves still remain clasped together, forcing the growing tip sideways; despite this stubbornness, the third and fourth leaves have managed to open.

Day 25. At last, by bending low over the tomato seedlings, it is possible to smell the peppery scent that they keep close to themselves. Soon gangly adolescent stems will need cane supports. The rest of the tomato story is known.

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