Container gardening: U. encourages raising one's own fresh produce

Nicolette Alleman has food allergies, lots of them. So she grows her own food.

The University of Utah anthropology senior had seen the school-sponsored weekly farmer's market from afar, walking through campus. On Thursday, she decided to join in by selling all the home-grown produce she couldn't eat, which she said happens to be "all natural and all organic, because that is what I have to eat for myself."

By 2 p.m., she had all but sold out her baskets of squash, eggplant, pumpkins and heirloom tomatoes. "The return has been good because I wasn't planning on selling anything when I planted it," Alleman said. She harvests all her produce herself, from two overgrown redwood boxes she built for gardening on the outside porch of her condominium.

Container gardening — growing produce in small spaces and on porches and fire escapes where the sun reaches at least a part of the day — has become quite popular for a growing number of apartment-dwellers in the current economy. The university's farmer's market committee held a workshop Thursday on container gardening, in hopes that more people will pick it up.

"It's a very controlled environment and a place where results can really flourish," said Barbara Elieson, a clinical dietitian at the U.'s Wellness Center who taught at the workshop. She says she doesn't fancy herself a gardening expert, per se, but has been planting and harvesting on the same plot of land in Sugar House for as long as she can remember. "We have just about everything you could imagine in our garden. I don't have to buy a single vegetable all summer long."

Although Elieson has ample space in her backyard for gardening, there are a few plants she likes to keep growing all year long, starting them in pots and bringing them inside during the winter months. Specifically, she said she likes to keep basil in a pot, "because I like to keep it close to my kitchen."

Culinary herbs, flowers, lettuces and other greens are good for growing in pots, Elieson said, because they have the potential to produce all year long if planted in the right soil. Container plants, however, need to get five to six hours of sunlight each day, fertilizer once in a while and water whenever necessary.

"Sometimes we love our plants to death by watering them too much," Elieson said. She planted five pots, each containing one of the following: romaine lettuce, basil, hyacinth and crocus bulbs, mint and cyclamen. The only thing she doesn't have room for on her porch is corn.