If you're not a gardener, gardening can sound pretty intimidating - planning, weeding, watering and fending off various predators for months at a time - and unless you are growing edibles, your reward may only be a pretty picture. Those of us who are already invested wouldn't give it up for the world, but we want you to give it a try, too - and there's no better way to start than with containers.

These two books - Little Herb Gardens, by GeorgeAnne Brennan and Mimi Luebbermann, and The Ultimate Container Gardener, by Stephanie Donaldson - each contain numerous projects that can be completed in an hour or an afternoon, but will provide enjoyment for weeks and months afterward. Even if you think you are hopeless with plants, these charming arrangements will make you want to try again. And if have a "real" garden, like me, you'll find yourself flipping the pages with increasing restlessness and finally heading out to the basement or tool shed to get some use out of those old pots you'd almost forgotten about.

Little Herb Gardens was the book that inspired us to begin our own herb garden several years ago, mere months after moving into our house. I've mentioned before that herbs are almost impossible to kill; a loose definition of the word might be "a weed that people have figured out how to use in cooking." Once established in the ground, they rarely need watering, and they will produce until the first frost; I have even dug through the snow to find sprigs of thyme in February. Most of them re-seed themselves and come back year after year to delight you with their fragrance and flavor. And if you've never cooked with fresh herbs, you can and should afford the luxury!



The book begins with some basic information about herbs in general, listing the most common annuals and perennials; it then gives some basic information about the best conditions for soil, watering and fertilizing. (We're talking eight pages total, and half of that is pictures!) Projects are then grouped by location: Fire Escape for city-dwellers, Inside Porch, Outside Porch and Patch of Ground for suburbanites, and Vast Vistas for those with a little more breathing room. Each project fits on a double-page spread, with a lovely, inspiring photo, a specific list of materials, and guidelines for where and when to place the plants. Most of the suggested herbs are fairly traditional, but there are a few, like green garlic and nasturtiums, that I had never thought of growing indoors and will certainly try now. At the end, there's a brief section of recipes that can be adapted for many types of herbs: flavored oils, vinegars and desserts.

The Ultimate Container Gardener is a far more extensive and adventurous book, and it favors more decorative arrangements than practically useful ones. However, the photographs are seductive in the way only do-it-yourself photographs can be; if you are familiar with DK books, you will be especially intrigued. The plants for each project are pictured separately, so that you can bring the book with you to the garden center and compare; then there are several step-by-step instructional photos and a photo of the end result, pretty but simple enough to make you think you could do that!

There is another section on gardening techniques and tools; it's longer than the one in Little Herb Gardens, but it does include lots of helpful photos of, for instance, how to propagate a plant from a cutting, and several methods for pest removal. These projects are grouped by several different variables: color scheme, season, and location. There are also special sections of projects for children, plantings that are edible or especially fragrant, and lots of ideas for decorating containers with shells, paint and a variety of other media. Altogether, there are probably 150 projects, and there are very few duds, at least for my personal taste (I have never really understood the garden-in-a-boot thing) They range from very simple to somewhat complex; the common thread is that all of them can live on your porch, deck or fire escape. A little water and sunshine, and a lot of admiration, are the only requirements.

Things like cilantro, lettuce, dill, and peas have long since stopped yielding edible materials in my garden. I've learned that when I'm thinning out the garden to make way for fall plantings, if I leave a nice small clump in the ground at the end of the row, in August and September I can harvest mature seeds to use for next year.

To do this yourself, just make sure the seeds are brownish (i.e. mostly dried up) and be careful how you store them. They need to be kept very dry and at room temperature or slightly cold- like in a poorly insulated garage would be OK. I use old envelopes that I cut in half - the kind of envelopes that I get in the mail with my bills, despite the fact that I have automatic online bill pay. You just tape the top down, cut them in half, and voila! Free seed storage!


Cilantro seeds.

One thing to note about seeds is that a few plants are trickier than you'd think. Herb seeds are almost always a simple task- grab a bunch, stick 'em in the envelope, plant in the spring. But some fruits (the scientific "fruit" definition, meaning a fleshy thing that surrounds the seeds) like zucchini, like to cross breed. So if you have, for instance, a zucchini plant next to a pumpkin plant, you can't save the zucchini or pumpkin seeds and expect to get good zucs or pumpkins. You'll most likely get a cross of the two, which probably won't be very good.

The two most problematic cross-pollinators I know of can be grouped as follows:

Squashes and their friends

• cucumber


• zucchini


• yellow squash


• pumpkin


• hubbard squash


• spaghetti squash


• and many other winter squash varieties

Peas

• snow peas


• sweet peas


• snap peas


• shelling peas


• you get the idea

If you plant two of these within a group (like a snow pea and a sweet pea) than you are asking for weird hybrid seeds. Also, if you neighbor has a pumpkin patch, and all you have are zucchinis, a few of your seeds might create off-kilter hybridized adults.

This is not a problem if you are growing something just for looks. For instance, one year I had about five kinds of sunflowers. The next year I used the sunflower seeds, fully knowing I had hybridized seeds. They looked great. I do the same with my sweet peas, which I grow just because they are pretty. I don't care if I get pink flowers because my red sweet peas hybridized with my white snow peas. They are still pretty. I plant about 50/50 saved sweet peas and bought sweet peas to keep the flowers reasonably brightly colored. It saves me about $4 a year, which is nice. (Spoken like a true home gardener.) I'd say in general, seed saving saves me over $30 per season - not too shabby.

Be forewarned when it comes to food plants that you can shoot yourself in the foot this way. Something like a snow pea/shelling pea mix might be gross and stringy- forcing you to buy snow peas at the farmer's market where they are $2 a bag, instead of $2 to buy enough high quality seeds for all you can eat all season long. And a zucchini with a rock hard pumpkin rind might be inedible. So seed-saving can, if not executed properly, ruin a whole harvest. Quick searches on the internet for seed saving info will probably tell you if your specific plant can be saved, or if it is a problematic hybridizer.

When it comes to fleshy stuff (like squashes, tomatoes, etc) the key is to wait until the seeds have firm brownish outer coats, and then make sure the seeds dry out pretty rapidly. I've never done this with tomatoes myself because I don't grow them from seed (here in Montana you need a greenhouse to do that) but I know for most other plants you just wait until the fruit is very ripe, remove the seeds, clean off as much of the flesh of the fruit as is practical, and then dry the cleaned seeds somewhere with indirect sunlight, very low humidity, and a minimal chance your dog will eat them.

Here is a nice trick; you can expect that the plants in the fields of farmers are in big groups and hybridization isn't a huge issue. Four years ago I bought a nice pie pumpkin from a local grower. I saved all the seeds and have had excellent pie pumpkins each year. This year, the remaining seeds were fully four years old and I was worried about germination. So I planted all 13 seeds hoping for about 4 starts. Then I had to take care of my newborn baby, forgot to water them, ignored them, yeah it wasn't ideal. But do you know how many tall healthy pumpkin starts I had in May? TWELVE.