Vasili's Garden Episodes
The potted Garden
If gardening is your passion but frustrated that you don’t have enough room in the garden to grow everything you dream about growing, or disappointed that you don’t have a garden at all and just a balcony or a courtyard that has been concreted from wall to wall, except for the cracks in the concrete.
And to grow anything in the cracks it takes a very special type of person with years of experience in growing plants in the most unusual places. Actually it doesn’t a special person it just takes a person who is overly passionate about growing and crazy enough to try it.
If such a person exists then it would have to be Andrew Defendini.
Andrew grows everything in pots and tubs in and around the garden and it’s not because he doesn’t have any room in the garden to grow his wonderful variety of plants, or that he lives in a flat with only a balcony.
Quite the contrary, Andrew has plenty of space in his garden to grow wonderful plants, but he has opted to grow everything in pots, and the reason for this apart from his madness is because he can move plants around as they require it, some plants do well in certain spots and some don’t. By growing them in pots gives Andrew the flexibility to moves these pots around to better locations where they will perform better too.
But apart from growing everything in pots, Andrew is quite innovative with many things in the garden too.
He has devised his own water harvesting and irrigation system by lining up a dozen or so plastic rubbish bins that positioned one hirer than the other and interconnected by and overflow hose at the top.
He also uses empty aluminium cans filled with water hung above his veggie plants, these have three great purposes.
1. He washes his hands when he has finished gardening and all the water falls straight into the garden.
2. The cans act as bird deterrents, scaring birds away from the garden with its reflecting shine.
3. On hot days the moisture in the can evaporates causing the environment surrounding the can to build humidity which is great to help keep the plants moist during long hot summer days.
If this tip isn’t enough for you to absorb and put into practice, then how about trying this tip for your lawns too.
Andrew has constructed a mechanical pulley system that he used to cover his lawn on days predicting extremely high temperatures.
We all know about covering our plants with some shade cloth to help reduce heat stress keeping the plants cooler and able to tolerate extreme weather conditions, well Andrew has done the same for his lawns.
As he says, ‘I never waters my lawns, I just cover them up with some shade cloth about 1 meter above the ground, at night it keeps the moisture in the plants creating dew and in the mornings it keeps it cooler and moist longer, it works perfectly.’
And the list of inventions go on and on for Andrew, making his own compost and potting mix by recycling kitchen scraps and greens, to gravity fed tanks throughout the garden.
So for those of you who think that you don’t have enough room or you can’t afford to garden productively, think again, if Andrew can do it and be ever so successful then there is no reason why you can’t either.
Do be lazy, get out there and plants some up in pots too.
Maresi!
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