Urban organic gardening - table gardens

April 9, 10:59 AMDenver Organic Gardening ExaminerAmy Peck

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UMD professsor Jon Traunfeld's salad table design

Having spent my formative years on the eastern plains of Colorado either in the large backyard at my grandparents' house or later on their even larger farm, my visions of a vegetable garden tend toward long rows and lots of plants. As an adult I have spent most of the last twenty years in Denver and have occupied every conceivable urban dwelling from a small studio apartment on the third floor of the Robert Frost building in Denver's historic Poet's Row to a four bedroom house with a sprawling lot in Littleton.

I must admit that my gardening in the studio apartment limited itself to houseplants and a steady supply of grass that my cats ate greedily and vomited up regularly. Somehow this didn't jive with my idyllic gardening dreamscapes. Honestly, living in the apartment that didn't even boast of a balcony, did not inspire me to think at all about gardening, nor did my full time school and work schedules really allow for it.

As I moved around the city and my apartments became duplexes with small patches of yard, the itch for gardening started to take hold. When a front porch presented itself a planter would soon appear filled with flowers. Flowers are where I started honing my gardening skills. When we bought our first home in Littleton over ten years ago the giant-ness of the yard compared to the places we had previously lived compelled me to plant my first vegetable garden and it was a roaring failure. I can't remember if I harvested any vegetables from the many plants I planted that year.

After that year I began to spend time talking to people about gardening and I started reading about best practices and upon the first year's failures I started building small successes. Five years later our family had the opportunity to live rurally in Iowa and I realized my ideal garden dream. I planted four fifteen foot rows of green beans, multiple tomatoes and eggplants and had enough zucchini that year to feed a small town.

As the old saying goes, hindsight is 20/20 and gardening is no exception. The advantage the gardener has in this circumstance is that every year she is afforded the luxury of giving it another go. And while I'm not about to head back into an apartment dwelling existence anytime soon, I have learned some things that will allow for the urban gardener to start honing their gardening chops without a patch of dirt to his name.

Table gardens are an inexpensive way to start gardening when space is at a premium. Plant shallow-rooted plants like lettuce and radishes to be raised on your balcony or small patio while the weather is still cool and treat yourself to food that doesn't get any more local nor any fresher. If your apartment has no balcony or patio talk to your building manager about utilizing a space somewhere on the building grounds. Table gardens are a great way for people with yards to get a feel for the gardening life as well.

Making your own table garden (also known as a salad table):

There are no hard and fast rules to this great DIY project. Use whatever supplies you have available or that are easy to locate and follow these basic instructions that I found in the latest copy of MaryJanes Farm.

1. Use an equal combination of peatmoss and compost.
2. The depth of the soil is dependent on the size of lumber used - use 2 x 4s for most salad greens, 2 x 6s for snap beans, or use 2 x 8s to grow things like peppers, tomatoes and bush cucumbers.
3. The bottom of the box should keep the soil in but allow for drainage. Hardware cloth makes a good bottom. Between the mesh and the soil layer with  newspaper, brown paper bags or fiberglass windowscreen.
4. Use a set of sawhorses, or make your own support base, to set the table on. This keeps the table off the ground and draining well. It also is good on the back.
5. Add wheels to one side of your table base (if not using saw horses) so you can manuever it around your space.
6. Fertilize regularly with an organic fertilizer. Try compost tea or fish compost.

For further instructions check out this video from Martha Stewart featuring the design of Jon Traunfeld from the University of Maryland.