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markdpelhamny

Review of 'Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers'

markdpelhamny
15 years ago

Review of "Incredible Vegetables from Self-Watering Containers" by Edward C. Smith

Ed Smith is the author of "The Vegetable Gardener's Bible", a successful and well-regarded book which I own and have read several times. Like the "Bible", "Incredible Vegetables" proposes a method based around an acronym - POTS, which is Portable, Organic, Trouble-free, Secret soil formula. Through POTS, Smith contends, you can successfully grow a wide variety of herbs and vegetables - even better than with traditional, "in the ground" methods. I'm writing this review from the perspective of a relatively new gardener interested in self-watering containers (SWC) and container culture in general (I have a small yard and a large patio). I would leave technical critiques of Smith's growing advice to more knowledgeable gardeners.

The book is in three parts - "Get Growing in Containers", which covers the general concepts of SWC; "Putting It All Together", which addresses the nuts and bolts of growing in SWC; and "Incredible Edibles", which is your standard index of vegetables, herbs and flowers and how to grow them using POTS. Part one starts off with the obvious stuff - the pot and the soil. Strangely, Smith only really discusses retail SWC rather than any of the myriad of homemade options. Given that there are relatively few places to buy SWC and they can be fairly expensive, I was very surprised by this. One page is devoted to a DIY SWC, but it uses the SWC inserts sold by Gardener's Supply. Smith has actually recently contributed an article to Mother Earth News where he describes making SWC with 2 5 gallon buckets - I've included the link below.

As for the "secret soil" referenced by the POTS acronym, it's primarily a compost/potting soil mixture with some organic fertilizers and additives (in deference to Smith, you can buy the book if you want the recipe). I've read many threads in both this Container forum and the Organic Growing forum on the use of compost in containers and can only conclude that there are different strokes for different folks. It would have made the book more useful if Smith had provided some formulas for creating your own potting soil since this can be done much more inexpensively (and possibly better) than the store-bought stuff. There are plenty of well established mixes (including obviously Al's Mix and the various Cornell mixes) and it would have been interesting to have Smith cover the different considerations and the requirements of various plant families. There's minimal discussion of topics like soil compaction, pH and specific nutritional considerations for container culture. I guess you have to come here for that...

The first section of the book concludes with some basic info on composting and tools for container planting - I think Smith's section on composting in the "Bible" is quite good and found the coverage in the POTS system nearly pointless in its brevity. The second section addresses what vegetables to grow in containers, where to place your pots, seed starting and nursery plant selection. It's surprisingly brief and not particularly useful. Most of considerations for what works well is left in the final section and the seed starting advice is just too brief to be meaningful. Smith then addresses container design aesthetic (he offers, for example, a "Touch of Provence" pot with fennel, thyme and sage but oddly no lavender, but perhaps that doesn't do well in pots). This is fairly good - nice pictures, good combinations, pretty much container design 101 but with vegetables rather than flowers.

Next, he covers caring for the containers as the vegetables grow - again, surprisingly weak on the actual how-to. He devotes only two paragraphs to ongoing fertilizer requirements. Also, one of the real challenges in container gardening seems to be supporting plants - how do you trellis in a container, prevent wind from blowing it over, etc. He also doesn't address automated watering systems for SWC. When I purchased this book I really wanted some nuts and bolts solutions (diagrams! pictures! shopping lists!) to these challenges and it's notable how little Smith delivers. This is actually a complaint I have about Smith's "Bible" as well -- good book, but weak on the implementation guidelines.

The chapter on pests is decent but not really that different from the considerations for ground gardening. I've suffered horribly from slugs in the past and was surprised Smith doesn't mention iron phosphate (Sluggo) as an option - I know POTS is organic but I was under the impression that iron phosphate is tolerated by most organic gardeners in the same way Bt is. Again, I think that Smith's "Bible" is a vastly better reference for pest management.

The last part of the second section addresses succession planting and what to do with planters when the growing season is over. Smith does propose reusing potting soil - I don't think this is a great idea based on my reading, and he doesn't address considerations for soil compaction at all. He makes the odd claim that "some of the compost is gone, turned into plant food by soil-dwelling microbes". I'm sure this is true to an extent, but I suspect most of it has been washed out by overflow watering or just been compacted down over time.

The last section of the book is about the various crops and how well they work in SWC or containers in general. He usefully awards an "Ed's Pick" ribbon to vegetables that are particularly good when grown in containers. The section on lettuce is great and it makes me want to rip out all the lettuce I've started in beds and move it to a container. There are a few surprises - I would have never thought to grow leeks or summer squash in a container but Smith makes a good case for this. However, the section on growing tomatoes is unsatisfying - this is one crop for which my family has an ungovernable appetite and too little space to grow, and I've longed for a sound method for growing in containers. His treatment of tomato pruning, which seems like an obvious topic for constrained spaces, is very disappointing. Overall, however, this section is very useful.

In general, Smith doesn't address container culture for areas of the country with different climates (he's in Maine and there's a lot of talk about cold winters). Insofar as this book is written based on his experience, I can't fault him. However, I have to assume SWC and containers are appealing to very hot places like Texas as well as semitropical areas like Florida where the native soil isn't particularly easy to grow many vegetables in and the soil pests are a greater menace.

POTS doesn't address topics like fruits apart from two pages on strawberry culture in the final section. Although strawberries are an obvious container favorite, the book pretty much ignores them throughout (i.e., they're not included in the "How Much Sun" section). If I want blueberries, strawberries, figs and raspberries, I'll have to go elsewhere.

Although the book is well organized and readable, I do wish there were more charts and summaries. Maybe I'm betraying my vocational world here, but whatever you might say about business writing, its reliance on bullet points, charts, diagrams and summaries is something a lot of gardening books could learn from.

There are relatively few books on growing vegetables in containers - a casual scan of Amazon shows a half-dozen books in the past 10 years on this topic, versus literally hundreds on general vegetable gardening topics. Certainly Smith's book is the only one to focus on SWC and vegetables.

Would I buy it again? Yes, certainly, I've enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit.

Here is a link that might be useful: Smith's article in Mother Earth News

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