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Even if you don’t have a pot to put a pea in, you have enough space for a garden on your balcony, patio or outside your studio apartment window.

Why not grow an “Edible Sunshine” theme garden in a container? You’ll harvest cherry tomatoes, thyme, sage and marjoram, and have edible flowers, such as day lilies and calendula, to dazzle your display all summer long.

Or, if you can squeeze in a planter 2 feet wide, try a “Dinner at the Four Seasons” theme garden.

This patio pot has an 8-foot-tall columnar apple tree (no branches but plenty of fruit) smack dab in the middle. In spring, Malabar spinach will climb up the tree trunk, and sprigs of chives will ward off apple scab. When the spinach is harvested, you plant dwarf basil and Tagetes marigolds (aka Mexican tarragon, with single, marigold-colored flowers in clusters). Then, when the basil is nipped by frost, plop in some pansies.

Get the idea? Wonderful, huh? We’re not stopping until every terrace, rooftop, houseboat and porch has a pot with just about anything you can harvest, eat and enjoy.

Where do you find the creativity to pull it all off? These two theme garden concepts are mere snapshots from a wonderful new book that takes all the guesswork out of patio gardening. “The Bountiful Container,” by Oregonians Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey can be gobbled up all at once or nibbled bit by bit.

I’m not a book reviewer. But I read and I garden, and I think this makes me uniquely qualified to blather on about garden books that are worth our time because they save us time.

Let me tell you, these authors have done the legwork for us. Nichols McGee is president of Nichols Garden Nursery in Albany, one of the best specialty seed nurseries in Oregon. And garden author Stuckey lives in a condominium with a bountiful container (or two or three) on a concrete patio no bigger than a picnic table.

“The Bountiful Container” (Workman Publishing Co.) is chock-full of gardening secrets we can all use.

From tips on growing “Powerful Peppers” (place one paper match and a spoonful of crushed eggshells in the soil under every transplant!) to preventing pot pillaging (thread a metal cable through the drainage holes at the bottom of the pot before you fill it and fasten it to something stationary), “The Bountiful Container” has a zillion ideas and step-by-step instructions.

Heck, this book could write the reunion script for “Green Acres in the City,” with Eva Gabor adoring her penthouse view while hubby city-farms on the balcony.

Now, darrrlink, here’s this week’s to-do list:

• Cut the old blooms off spring-flowering perennials.
• Prune out old, damaged stems of lavender when new growth breaks elsewhere in the clump.
• Pinch back greenery to control the height of bee balm, Shasta daisies and phlox.
• Fertilize roses.