Container gardening is gaining popularity all over the country because of its particular benefits: very little weeding, portability, less bending, and potentially, much less cost to renew and amend soil every year as compared to a large in-ground garden. One of our favorite things about container gardening is that almost anyone can do it—even apartment dwellers with sunny balconies.

The Giving Garden has about 2000 square feet of container gardens, with more planned in the future. We amend the soil with our own rabbit and chicken manure and homemade compost. Our goal is to move away from bagged potting soil and purchased garden soil to fill our containers, as our stores of manure and compost increase over time.

Classic in-ground gardens are always in style and we’re completing a 640-square-foot area for a future planting area. This area will host a lot of our heat-loving crops like herbs, flowers, okra, beans, and others.

Our new 700-square-foot caterpillar tunnel is the newest addition to the Garden growing spaces, enabling us to moderate (if not control) the environment for some of our premium crops like tomatoes and peppers.

Texas gives us a nice long growing season so we try to capitalize on both the cool weather crops in spring and fall and also the warm (hot!) weather crops in the summer.

Our members enjoy planting seeds in nursery pots and then transplanting those growing plants into larger pots so they can mature and fruit in their time. We have customized irrigation systems to keep the appropriate amount of water on the plants every day, reducing the hands-on time it takes to care for the crops.