Want an easy kitchen garden on the deck or patio? Check out these container-ready lines for 2010

So I moved to this new house with a huge, tiered deck out back. It’s white, with tons of white snow on top. It makes me hungry for the colors of summer veggie gardening – red peppers, orange carrots, yellow squash and purple eggplant.

So looking out the window, I get this idea for a kitchen garden on the deck, with container vegetables just a few paces away. I pictured my preschooler proudly starting seeds or picking cherry tomatoes for Mommy’s salad.

My next step was to do a little Internet shopping, to find good container veggie varieties (see my next post). But before I got very far, I learned there are whole new lines and marketing programs focused on this very topic. Figures, since veggie gardening and small-space or container gardening are two of the biggest garden trends.

Here’s some of what I found, so if you’re looking for the easy-care gardening way to fresh produce, you can anticipate some of what the garden centers might be carrying this spring.

Culinary Couture^TM line (at right)

Available as seeds or finished plants at garden centers this spring, this fashionable and flavorable line from Hort Couture includes ‘City Gardener’ faves for the patio like Fairy Tale eggplant,  a "tabletop" cucumber, Apache chili pepper, Redskin pepper, Snow White tomato and Totem tomato.

Plants that Work in the Kitchen

Offered by plant commercializer Novalis, this line of herbs for the home garden launched last year. Even though information on new varieties for 2010 is scarce, the Novalis Web site has a "Where to Buy" section you can check to see which garden center near you carries the line.

Burpee Home Gardens

Ball Horticultural Co. Has partnered with Burpee to market 40 new varieties as ready-made plants that used to only be offered through Burpee as seed, including Tumbler, the perfect variety for hanging baskets and planters. The Burpee Home Gardens Program Web site has a “Where to Buy” section you can check (closer to spring) to see which local garden center carries the line.,

Patio Edibles

From Vegetalis, a new company created by Floranova, this line offers veggies and herbs that can be grown on the windowsill or patio and mixed with ornamentals. Offerings include Little Sun Yellow, "the little tomato with the big fruiting habit," Tumbling Junior Yellow, a compact cherry-type yellow tomato with a lightly trailing habit, a small, white-fruited eggplant with a well-branched, compact habit, Gigantic Chive, a taller-than-usual chive designed to be a thriller in the middle of a mixed herb container, Sweet n’ Neat tomatoes with cocktail-size cherry tomatoes (in yellow and red) and the neatly-mounding Aristotle basil.

For more information, you can also visit Joyful Abode, GardenGirlTV and these other container gardening blogs: http://www.container-garden.info and http://containergardening.wordpress.com/.

So now I want to hear from you: What varieties of container veggies have you tried, and what worked out? Or, do you plan to grow veggies in containers this year? If so, what?