Meet my hillbilly container garden.

I am going to be THAT old lady. The one with geraniums growing out of a toilet in the front yard.

It's hard to be an urban farmer when all you've got is a 5 x 5 patch of earth outside your studio apartment that you're not even sure is included in your rental agreement.

So naturally, this book "Garden Anywhere" caught my eye. (And this the part where I brag a bit about my job. This book isn't out yet but will be released later this month. Publishers send me pre-publication copies, to impress me enough to promote them. Guess what, it works.)

This past weekend I went scrounging around for my first fleet of containers. I found the tins (soon to be known as the chive tray and the pepper popper) at "the bins," which is a Goodwill outlet warehouse lined with troughs of every random piece of crap you can imagine, priced by the pound. It's quite terrifying, really. Lucky for me, tin is light, so they set me back about $1.75. I found the "chard drawer" at a place called The Rebuilding Center, a really great non-profit that sells salvaged construction and remodeling materials. There is a room full of toilets, which I was instantly drawn to for reasons that now seem obvious. I picked up my sweet dresser remnant for two bucks.

I still have some research to do on soils and sun and growing seasons, and hope to find some more containers. The book even shows you how to grow potatoes in a feed sack. I figure if I'm going to hint at my trailer-park tendencies, I might as well hit the ball out of the park.