5 Plants for Small-Space Container Gardening | Growing a Snack Bar

We’re turning our GreenStalk into a snack bar for the kids! Here are 5 fun, food-producing plants that thrive in small containers!

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[Music] hey friends welcome back to food prep guide I am out here next to my green stock and we’ve done a couple of videos on the green stock so far on this channel but this particular year and years past this was my salad green garden I guess you could say I pretty much only grew salad greens in the green stock I have the leaf which if you are not famili with green stock they come in the leaf container and the original the original has deeper pockets for you to grow pretty much anything you want Tomatoes eggplants watermelons anything um but the leaf container is more shallow and is better suited for shallow rooted crops like your leafy greens but with that said I am there are certain varieties container um certain varieties of vegetables and fruits that are so compact and have such a shallow root system that they can work in Shallow potted containers kind of like these pockets on my green stock Leaf here and I have gone back and forth so many times trying to figure out what to use my green stock for this this year I have completely revamped my garden if you’re new here um you might not know that we have switched to weed fabric and it has just completely change the way that I have mapped out my garden so this is no longer needed to be leafy greens I just could not decide on what to do but I have finally nailed it down and it is going to be my children’s snacking Tower this is an area in the garden where they don’t have to ask if they can have a certain thing they don’t have to ask how many they can have this is going to be their free range free will if you want a snack come out pick what you want enjoy it you don’t have to ask permission first so that is what this is going to be and I thought it would be fun to bring you specific varieties that I have chosen to put into the green stock this year and I have chosen this specifically for child friendly palettes flavor palettes um shallow container style smaller compact crops and something that can be grown in my hot summers but I also want to use this throughout the fall and winter as well so I also picked some varieties they’re going to go do during they’re going to do well in cooler temperatures as well so I have five in particular these aren’t going to be the only five that I grow here in the green stock but they are the five primary snackers that I’ve chosen this year so welcome to food prep guide my name is Jordan I’m a homeschooling mom to three living on three beautiful Acres with my wonderful husband a Health crisis forced our family to change the way we think about food unfortunately it also put us in financial hardship thankfully the solution to both challenges was the same to live off the land as much as possible for us that means growing a garden preserving the Harvest raising chickens and cooking from scratch it’s definitely a family affair and friends too meet Stacy researcher author and lifelong learner she entered the world of food preservation in the crazy days of 2020 she joined a gleaning Co-op and a local grosser offered her clearance produce in bulk and so the adventure began together we’re reclaiming the old ways of food stewardship and teaching them to the Next Generation if there’s one thing you should know about us is that we love Jesus and seek to Steward His blessings wisely our table always has room for one more so y’all come join us let’s hop straight into it you can see that I already have some greens growing my children absolutely love just ripping leaves off of lettuce and greens and snacking on those so I went ahead and put in some tat soy here that’s what these beautiful um greens are and that is one of the um plants that I have chosen is tat soy the reason why I have chosen it is because tat soy is both heat tolerant and cold tolerant so it can essentially take you all through the season now if you live in a very hot climate I live in Z 7B 8A and there’s probably going to be a time period in July maybe early August that I’m not going to be able to grow this tat soy I’ll probably bolt on me bolting means just going to seed it can get bitter um but because of how heat tolerant and cool tolerant it is it’s a great option for almost yearr round snacking in something like the green stock so I already have the first it’s really windy I hope um the mik getting sounding too bad for y’all the first two rows here I have all tat soy and then I have just a little bit of this salad Bernett sprinkled throughout so far on the third row it’s not completely full but salad Bernette is an herb that tastes just like cucumbers my children absolutely love the taste of cucumbers our cucumbers won’t be ready for harvesting until probably uh early June maybe late May um and so this is just going to give them a little cucumber flavor while they wait for the good stuff to come in okay so after the tat soy here’s what I am extremely excited about and they are too orange hat Tomatoes orange hat tomatoes are a micro variety of tomatoes they’re not just compact they’re not just container they are micro they only get to be about 18 in tall and even though they only get to about be about 18 in tall look at how heavily it sets fruit now I when I was looking at the seed package I was like well they’re going to choose the best picture to sell their product you know so how are they really this loaded with with fruit being that small so I poured through what felt like hundreds of reviews lots and lots of pictures on Facebook and their um uh Baker Creek like kind of heirloom fan club I guess you could say where people have posted all of their pictures of their orange hat micro tomatoes and yes it is true they set such heavy fruit all season long on these very tiny plants my children love cherry tomatoes and and the ones that are orange tend to be sweeter than the red ones so I’m going to be planting uh those primarily probably about 80% of the pockets that are left in the green stock are going to be these orange hat Tomatoes now with those I want to um talk about this one right after after because it’s Blue Lake bush beans Blue Lake bush beans are one of your bush variety of beans and they’re pretty compact they don’t require staking like um your pole variety of beans obviously need some trellising and staking but even a lot of your bush varieties need staking even though they’re not pole even though they’re not Vining and climbing they get so bushy and so big that you really need to stake them up and lift them off the ground and lift them off the containers but Blue Lake Bush you don’t need to stake at all they remain Compact and yet produce pod after pod after pod of your green beans now the reason why I wanted to talk about this in conjunction with the orange hat Tomatoes is because when you are planting in a container like the green stock or just a regular pot on your patio the amount of nutrients available to your plants is very limited right you’re only limited to the amount of nutrients in the soil in that pot The Roots can’t go through and get into the ground and get access to more nutrients so because of that nutrient competition and nutrient expenditure is a big thing and a big factor that we have to think about when we’re planting container um when we’re planting food items in a container style format so something that you um might want to consider when doing that is planting a nitrogen fixing food crop with a nitrogen feeding food crop so Tomatoes Tomatoes Tomatoes tomatoes are very high nitrogen feeders that means they need lots and lots of nitrogen available in the soil to be able to produce all the green leaves that it needs and then to be able to fruit properly now things in your legume family like your green beans they fix nitrogen into the soil meaning whatever nitrogen is in the soil those roots are going to uptake and they’re going to actually produce these little root nodules on the roots where the nitrogen is going to be stored so they’re not they don’t need a whole lot of nitrogen but not only do they not need a whole lot of nitrogen they keep nitrogen into the soil so because I have such limited Pockets here especially being the leaf container variety being a shallower container what I’m going to do is I’m going to alternate Pockets I’ll do a tomato a green bean a green bean a tomato so that they are next to each other in each tier and yet not competing for nutrients and not only not competing for nutrients but actually benefiting from the nitrogen fixing capabilities of the green beans so just a t tip for you you might want to pair a nitrogen feeding crop like tomatoes with a nitrogen fixing crop like something in the green bean or pea family and my children just absolutely love the flavor of fresh green beans not canned green beans so much they’re kind of like me in that regard but fresh green beans all day whoops let me pick that up real quick I don’t want the wind to blow it away it’s pretty windy today okay so I mentioned that my children love just ripping off leaves and eating um salad greens I think that’s probably one of the reasons why I have struggled so much with producing our salad greens for a year Supply at a time just a constant because I’ll come out one day and like two whole heads will be gone because they have eaten them now I don’t think the answer to that problem is to limit how many greens my children eat I love that they love greens so that’s not the uh solution the solution is to grow more greens which is why we’re not growing them in the green stock this year other than tat soy and little gem lettuce they love St in on little lettuce like these and you can see the fork you can see the um the size comparison of the little gem to the fork they create these little heads kind of like a little bit of a little bit of a Roma but like a tighter um a tighter style than that and but they’re so small and they’re so cute and so you can fit a lot in one space I will be planting about three per pocket in this Leaf style uh green stock but little gem lettuce so compact um this will be another good one to sprinkle in with your tomatoes because lettuce while they don’t fix nitrogen um actually never mind they’re a little bit too too heavy in nitrogen so scratch that I was thinking since they’re small they won’t take up quite as much but that’s true when it comes to spacing you could plant these underneath your tomatoes and they might do pretty well um but they need too much nitrogen and they would be competing too badly with the tomatoes so that’s not going to be that’s not going to be good I will probably put these on a separate container than my tomatoes I’ll probably alternate the tomatoes and green beans and then a little gem lettuce and then the tomatoes and green beans and then the little gem lettuce last but not least number five is going to be Tom Thumb peas y’all these are so stinking cute they only get to be about 18 to 24 in tall you can see that pot this is a fully mature plant in this picture you can see all the pods um that it is producing very productive plant in a very small amount of space now this is a cool loving crop it’s not something I’m going to be planting alongside my tomatoes which are of course a heat leaving crop this is what’s going to be taking me through fall and winter so I won’t be filling up my green stock with these just yet but probably around August what I’m going to do as soon as all of those tomatoes are gone I’m probably going to um take them all out probably feed my soil just a little bit not with nitrogen because uh peas don’t need nitrogen they are in the lagum family which means they fix nitrogen into the soil so I’ll probably refresh it with with just a little bit of um maybe some maybe a little bit of bone meal maybe a little bit of potassium and um just cuz they do flower and pea plants need some potassium to do the flowering process um the more flowers you get the more pies you get so I’ll probably refresh the soil and plant the entire grain stock with the Tom Thumb sweet peas and the little gem lettuce and that’s going to be all of their fall and winter snacking crops for my kiddos um so from with starting as soon as well now they’re already coming out here and picking off leaves and eating those but it’s probably going to be about six to eight weeks before they’re harvesting these orange hat Tomatoes um but other than that they will have some tomatoes to snack on green beans to snack on greens to snack on and then in the fall into winter all of those delicious Tom Thumb sweet peas so fun so cute I hope that was helpful to y’all if y’all are going to be container gardening consider these really compact even micro type varieties that will allow you to produce more food and less space that’s all for today we’ll see you next time bye