At a quarter inch to the foot, our front porch is six and a half inches wide and two inches deep. That's how it looks in my spiral garden notebook every year around this time, drawn in pencil with a ruler and then filled in with colored pencil before I buy a single bag of soil. The real porch is 26 feet wide, 8 feet deep and faces southwest, which makes it the sunniest 208 square feet we own and the place where most of our container growing happens.
The first container garden I ever saw belonged to my Abuela Ana: coffee cans of ají dulce, recao and oregano brujo lined up on a Bronx fire escape. She had maybe eight square feet and never wasted an inch. I think about that every time I start one of these sketches.
Drawing the light first
Before any pots go on the page, I shade the sun. The porch gets light from late morning until sunset, and the western end, out past the last column, cooks in the afternoon. Because the porch is covered, the strip along the front rail gets the most direct sun in midsummer, when the sun rides high, while the back three feet near the house wall get less than you'd guess. So I draw a band of yellow pencil along the rail, a deeper orange at the hot western end, and a pale gray wash against the wall.
Then the things that don't move. The wooden steps and the path to the wood-framed screen door stay clear. That rule came from last July, when Nate came up the steps with two grocery bags, met a galvanized pot that had migrated into the path and said a word Mateo repeated at dinner. The weathered bench, which came from my mom's old apartment, stays at the western end, where the herbs get the hottest sun on the property. The two window boxes on the white rail stay where they are.
Porch math for 34 containers
Last year we had roughly 28 containers between the porch and the yard. This year's sketch has 34, and every one of them is a little circle or rectangle with a name written next to it in tiny letters.
The four 5-gallon tomato buckets go at the sunny western end, where they'll get the full afternoon blast. The bench holds the herbs: basil, thyme, parsley, sage, oregano, cilantro and the rosemary, once it comes back out from its winter windowsill. The new item is strawberries. Six grow bags on the wooden steps, three of which I already own, lined up along one side so there's still room to walk up the middle. The fig goes back to its usual corner when it comes up from the coal room in April.
Heights matter as much as sun. Tall things at the ends and against the columns, short things in front, nothing that blocks the window boxes from the street. When I draw it in side view, I want the whole thing to read like a hill: low at the steps, rising toward the tomatoes.
Color, the part I really enjoy
This is where the art teacher comes out. For the window boxes I'm planning deep purple petunias, coral geraniums and trailing white alyssum. Purple and coral share a little red, so they hum together instead of shouting the way purple and yellow would, and the white works the way white space does in a painting: it gives your eye somewhere to rest. Against the white railing and clapboard, the trailing alyssum should look like lace spilling over the edge.
The color plan is also a budget plan. Last year the nursery line was $92, a good chunk of it window box flowers. This year I'm starting the petunias and alyssum from seed under the basement lights, and the geraniums are cuttings I took in October that have been rooting on the kitchen sill all winter. Petunia seed is as fine as dust and slow to get going, so this is a gamble. If they flop, I'll find out by April and adjust.
One empty rectangle sits near the screen door, labeled "chair?" in pencil. Nate turns 41 tomorrow, and while I was coloring tonight he looked over my shoulder and asked what it meant. I told him it means chair, question mark. He said that's exactly what he was afraid of.
