Starting a Summer Window Box Garden

Starting your own vegetable garden can be a great idea. Window boxes are one way to start a simple vegetable garden that can easily be accessed from a window, deck, or patio. Get some fall and summer window box ideas about starting your own vegetable garden and learn about window box gardening.  As more people turn to organic and whole foods, gardening will continue to grow in popularity.  Window box gardening makes learning how to garden fun, simple, and convenient and it gives you some ideas on how to use your window boxes year round.

Weather you're a beginner or a pro, a window box is a simple and convenient way to maintain a miniature garden.  Depending on the season, different plants and techniques are recommended to best optimize your garden.  As summer comes to an end and fall approaches, your window box garden will need some additional considerations to produce a healthy garden crop. 

The first consideration is root space.  A window box will be somewhat confining and depending on the size of your window box there may be a few limits as to what you can grow in your garden.  A window box should be at least 6 inches tall and deep to grow most vegetables, flowers, and plants.  Most window boxes can be used for landscaping during the spring as well, so getting a window box large enough for plants and flowers will give you more options year round. 

Late Summer and early Fall is the time to try to plant some vegetable seeds for the fall harvest. A perfect late summer window box idea is to plant some peas, spinach, lettuce, endive, beans, carrots, turnips, swiss chard, and beets are all excellent late summer plantings that do not need tons of root space.  These vegetables thrive in cool and humid temperatures also.

If you’re new to gardening you may wish to harvest your vegetables when they are young and beginning to show signs of ripeness.  This will make leave them tender when cooking, but more importantly this will increase your yields and extend your harvest and give you more experience to learn from.  Be on the lookout for insects and treat without pesticides if possible.  Monitoring plants for infestation from a popular window will be much easier and will allow you to quickly remove and plants should they become infested.

With high rainfalls in the summer, you will need to give your garden an extra boost of fertilizer. Rainfall leaches the nutrients from the soil and robs the plants of vital nutrition needed to produce. This is especially true for window box gardening.  Now is a perfect time to side dress the plants with granular fertilizer or to water with liquid plant food.  Make sure the window box has drainage holes and consider adding a drip irrigation kit that will make the window box self-watering.  This will give you one less thing to have to focus on for your mini garden project.

You will have vegetables in your freezer or on your shelf to enjoy long after frost ends the season. Almost everything you plant can be frozen or canned. Blanching or steaming is very important in freezing all vegetables. All vegetables need to be heated to kill the bacteria and then cooled immediately before freezing. 

And of course, even a window box needs weed prevention and care to make sure you are maximizing your efforts. The weeds are robbing your plants of moisture and nutrients and are encouraging insects and diseases in your garden. After the garden is weeded and side-dressed with granular fertilizer, water thoroughly and apply Preen or Concern to prevent weeds from returning. These weed killers will help keep your window box garden free of weeds.

Window box gardening is fun and most importantly simple.  It's a great way to start a garden and learn the basics in a way that is convenient and time saving.  It also gives you ideas of how to use your window boxes when the seasons begin to shift so that you can enjoy them year round.  With proper use, window boxes can be used all year long for a variety of reasons.  Starting a miniature garden is just one summer window box idea that will help spice things up.