Back Door Vegetables: How to Grow a Quick Container Garden

Has June crept up on you before you had a chance to start your summer garden? Even if you haven’t spent the last few months checking seed catalogs, cultivating the ground, and nurturing young plants indoors, don’t worry! It is absolutely not too late to make a start.

If you are looking for something fresh and tasty to pick in just a few short weeks, I highly suggest setting up a “Back Door Vegetable” container. Growing conditions are ideal right now—the frosts are long behind us, and the hours of daylight are stretching out into warm summer evenings. A patio veg box planted today is the perfect way to fast-track your harvest!

Setting Up Your Patio Veg Box

Along with fresh lettuce, tasty beetroot, and quick salad crops, a mixed container is the perfect combination for the taste of home-grown summers. To get good results quickly, it is critical to get your planting conditions right.

These crops will do best in rich, free-draining compost mixed with a general-purpose organic fertilizer. If you don’t want to build a raised bed, a simple, deep patio planter box is all you need to get started right outside your back door.

What to Plant: The Best Fast-Track Crops

The vivid colors in this planting scheme make for a highly attractive display, especially if you use five-color Swiss chard. Here is what I recommend planting together:

• Swiss Chard: I highly recommend the ‘Bright Lights’ or ‘Five Color Silverbeet’ varieties. With careful picking, they will keep sending up bright new shoots right through the summer.
• Beetroot: If you want to get a step ahead, buy young beetroot plugs from the nursery instead of starting from seed.
• Lettuce: Gourmet lettuce seed mixes are delicious and will provide a continuous supply of salad when sown successively.
• Radishes: Try the ‘Sparkler’ variety for an incredibly quick, tasty, and peppery crop that fills in the empty gaps.
• Spring Onions (Scallions): Fast-growing and perfect for tight spaces.

My Step-by-Step Planting Tips

Fill your container with high-quality compost. Next, sow six chard seeds about 10 cm apart, placing three beetroot plugs on either side. Keep the beetroot well separated so they have room to produce significantly larger roots.

Sow the lettuce thinly in 1 cm deep drills at one end of the planter. (Pro tip: Seed germination is actually quicker when the soil is slightly cooler, so sow your seeds in the late evening during hot weather and water them in with cold water.)

Sow six salad onions at the other end—or use plug plants to save even more time. Finally, pop your radish seeds into any remaining empty spaces in the soil.

Succession Tip: Always sow some backup lettuce seedlings in small pots on the side! These will come in incredibly handy later on, allowing you to instantly fill any gaps in your main container after you harvest your first batch of greens.

Aftercare and Harvesting

Once your seeds sprout, be sure to thin out the excess seedlings. If you handle them carefully, these thinnings can be potted into other containers, or you can simply eat them as microgreens!

If your plug plants were grown under a greenhouse cover at the nursery, remember to gradually acclimate them to outdoor temperatures (hardening off) before leaving them out overnight.

After the first six weeks, feed your veg box with a high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer every fortnight. Keep the box well-watered, pull any weeds, and constantly check for slugs and snails. For the absolute best flavor, harvest your beetroot when they are young and tender, gently levering the roots from the compost. They are ready to eat when the foliage starts to go slightly limp!

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