As we moved into a rented house in the very beginning of our Permaculture passion around mid 2016 we initially did not mind to have a stone tiled, sealed patio. We also just bought a property closeby and thought we would grow everything we desired there. Turned out that we did not grow anything on the property, but made our very first growing experiences entirely in a bathtub in the courtyard. A very tiny bathtub of 1,2m by 0,5m by 0,3m (4 foot by 1,5 foot by 1 foot)....
We came from our first little "Permaculture in the kitchen garden" one week course at a local Permaculture farm around August 2016, where my wife brought a cutting with a partial root of a dill plant that she bravely stuck into an old earth filled bathtub, which market the beginning of a quite intense gardening relationship with this reclaimed object.
As the dill cutting actually took off after the winter 2016/2017 I had the urge to make this bathtub work for the year of 2017. I chopped and dropped all "weeds" we had around in the courtyard into the bathtub. I covered that fresh organic mass with potting mix we had laying around, sheet mulched it with cardboard to surpress the abundance of weeds trying to repair this neglected piece of soil in the tub and mulched a thick layer of wood chips over it to retain moisture through our extremely hot and dry summer.
I even found an old photo of some of my strawberry suckers and borage seeds I started for a little guild of perannial food plant with annual partners. I also planted two peranneal coronilla cutting into the bathtub for "homemade nitrogen fixing". All planting where planted into little compost pockets that went through the cardboard sheet mulch. I also dropped in a little, very sad looking ginger rhyzome that I found in the kitchen. It was a mingle-mangle of what we had around, whith the intent to fill several nitches in space and time and also have some perennial and annual food growing, with strawberries being the highlight for the kids.
Here you see the bathtub shortly before peek growth in June 2017. The groundcover strawberries where still adapting in their first year yet giving "a berry a day" to our kids; the borrage as the herbal layer was keeping the strawberries nicely covered from the sun and attracted a ton of bees that we had to interrupt when picking a few flowers and leaves fo our salads; the dill went into abundant flowering also attracting hundrets of predatory wasps, while providing us with an abundance of "dill bedding" for fish out of the oven. The tub was fed frequently with worm leachate and completely exploded in abundance while not needing very much watering, even though it was one of the hottest and dries t siúmmers in a long time here.
But the star of this whole setup was not even palnted by us.... Funny enough the tomato you see in the right of the tub must have self seeded by us rincing our compost containers after feeding the worms. By coincidence I discovered the palnt creeping up on the side of the tub and supported it in its growth, by pruning it, building support for its growth and even establishing a mini swale on its foot to maximize the water the plant would get when we would water our pots in the courdyard. Sadly I can not find any pictures of the plant being still green and filled with hundrets upon hundrets of redcherry tomatos. I swear that one plant provided us with an abundance of 2 to 3 kilograms (4.4 lbs to 6.6 lbs) of the most delicious cherry tomatoes I ever tasted in my life!
At last the tub even managed to make the ginger grow and I harvested this cute little friend in November 2017, about a year after I had put that vey very sad rhyzome into the ground. It grew under complete negelect and was planted almost dead. After this first experiance of growing food in a Permaculture way I truely believe in the potential of the methods and can't wait to start our second growing season of 2018 in a bigger scale!
As always, thanks for listening.
Moritz