I’m Not Waiting for Raised Beds: How I Started a Fall Garden in Grow Bags

Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy through them, at no extra cost to you. I'm partnering with Epic Gardening this year, and I only link to things I'm actually using in my own yard. Use code HALFPINTMAMA for 5% off!

Last fall I wrote that the raised garden beds would have to wait. Turns out I was wrong about that.

Not about the beds, exactly. We still can't put them in. We're still in the suburbs with neighbors on both sides and an HOA with opinions about what the backyard is allowed to look like. That part hasn't changed.

What changed is that I finally asked myself why I was treating a raised bed like the ticket in. Like gardening was something that started after we had the land, after we broke ground, after everything was in place. I've been doing the same thing with homesteading in general, waiting to earn the title.

So this fall I bought grow bags. Soft fabric pots that sit on the patio, cost almost nothing, and nobody can tell me I can't have.

Why Grow Bags

I’ll be honest, I didn’t know these existed six months ago. Someone mentioned them and I filed it away as a lesser version of a real garden. A workaround.

They’re not. Fabric lets air reach the roots from every direction, which keeps plants from getting rootbound the way they do in plastic pots. They drain hard, which matters in Texas clay country. They cost a fraction of a raised bed. And when we finally move out to our land, they come with us. I can pick them up and put them in the truck. I went with both the 15-gallon bags and 5-gallon bags.

What I'm Actually Planting

Fall in Central Texas is the good season, which I did not know until recently. Everyone thinks about gardening in spring. Here, spring is when things start dying of heat. October is when you plant.

Here's what went in:

Chamomile. The one I'm most excited about. It grows all winter here and blooms in spring, and then you dry the flowers for tea. The idea that I could grow my own tea feels almost unreasonable.

Carrots. In their own bag, because apparently carrots don't share well. The kids picked these.

Kale and lettuce and spinach. The practical ones. Things I'll actually cut and put in dinner.

Cilantro, dill, parsley, and chives. I've killed cilantro every single summer. Nobody told me it's a cool-weather herb and that October is when it's supposed to go in. I'm trying again.

Thyme and oregano in little seed trays on the kitchen counter, because those are perennials and they're the ones making the move with us.

And calendula in the flower bed out front, which is technically a flower but the petals are edible and I have plans for them. Plus tiny tim littered randomly throughout the grow bags. It’s another edible flower but it also is known

The Part Where I Admit I Don't Know What I'm Doing

I want to be clear that I am not a gardener. I've killed a basil plant from the grocery store. I had to look up how deep to plant a carrot seed.

I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time standing in the soil aisle reading bags, trying to figure out the difference between potting mix and potting soil and garden soil, which it turns out are three different things.

But here's what I keep coming back to, the only way to not know what you're doing forever is to go ahead and do it badly the first time.

Some of this is going to fail. I'm making peace with that in advance, because the alternative is another year of reading about gardens instead of having one.

Why This Matters More Than the Vegetables

My kids helped. That's really the whole reason this moved from someday to this week.

They filled the bags. They got soil everywhere, including places soil has no business being. My oldest wanted to know why the carrot seeds were so small, and I didn't have a good answer, so we looked it up together.

I've written before that I want my children to know that food doesn't come from a store shelf. But I realized I was planning to teach them that later, on the land, in the version of our life that hasn't happened yet. They're growing up now. They're little now. The lesson has to happen in whatever yard we're standing in.

So they put seeds in dirt on a suburban patio in October, and in three weeks something green is going to come up, and they're going to be the ones who put it there.

Where I Got Everything

I'm partnering with Epic Gardening this year, which I'm genuinely glad about because I have been watching their YouTube vides for years now before any of this. Their grow bags are what I'm using, and their seed packets are the ones with the illustrations on the front that my daughter keeps asking to look at.

Check out my Epic Gardening favorites here! You can use my code HALFPINTMAMA for 5% off!

If you're going to start one thing, start with a single 5-gallon bag of cilantro. It's cheap, it's fast, and you'll use it.

What's Next

I'll report back honestly, including the parts that don't work. I'd rather show you reality rather than pretend this all went perfectly.

But I'm done waiting for the garden. It turns out the garden was always available. It just didn't look like the picture in my head.