
Container Gardening
We started doing container gardening while living in a tiny apartment in Seattle. I had to quit working a couple of months after my father passed away. I was trying to figure out how we can keep our household costs down to a minimum and started collecting empty tubs of yogurt containers. Instead of throwing away vegetable scraps, we planted everything from tomato seeds to garlic bulbs including herbs and other vegetables.
My husband also started planting hot chili peppers. We both like hot and spicy food and we use plenty of these hot and spicy peppers from dipping sauces to soup broths. One day, we saw a vertical spinning display rack unit that was left by the dumpster near our apartment unit. It's dumpster diving time! Woo Hoo! We brought it back up to our apartment and repurposed it into a vertical gardening rack. We bought some hooks, drilled holes into the container and voila! We got a new vertical garden rack which allowed us to have more vegetables and herb containers. We were able to harvest some fresh Bok choy, tomatoes, pepper, some herbs like mint, cilantro and onion leaves. Nothing beats the flavor of fresh herbs and vegetables.
When we moved out to Central Pennsylvania because of job relocation, he found out about the community gardening in our area. He was so excited to get into starting our gardening again. However, it was so popular that there was a long waitlist. And he was grumbling about it, and I said, "why don't you just get a small patch of land and start your own garden if you can't get into the waitlist?". I didn't realize that he took it seriously. He went around, looked for a small patch of land and found one. That is how Apple House Farm came into fruition. It all began from a small container that we recycled from a yogurt tub to a much larger plot of land.