Things are going well in the community garden - though fast grow the weeds is right! The week and a half we were away for the wedding and honeymoon led to a rampant spreading of weeds and crab grass in our gardens. We went down to weed and put hay on the plots, only to find out half way through weeding that all the hay available had already been used. A bit at a loss, we decided just to weed right up around the plants and hold out for a little while in hopes that there is more hay to be had. Otherwise, we may have to do some sort of mulch/newspaper combination.
Anyway, check out the container garden as of last Sunday.
Here is the first group - these are all various peppers, there are three pots up close to the railing which contain a battered pot of spinach, chard, and a nice looking pot of baby kale.
Here is the second group. Again, it is mostly peppers, as they do so well in containers, but we are trying a few new things in containers this year as well such as acorn squash, basil, dwarf sugar snap peas, and Tiger's Eye beans.
Here is a horrible picture of our Topsy Turvy planter that contains two Italian Heirloom tomatoes.
Check out the acorn squash, so far doing quite well in a window planter box.
The first bloom! We've had two more blooms open this week. I may need to get out there and hand pollinate in the mornings.
A picture of the "pepper infestation" on the cayenne pepper plant we started inside in February.
Another picture of the big cayenne plant. There are tons and tons of peppers on here and blooms opening everyday. Having it in this huge pot means it has lots of room to grow too.
Here is our second of three cayenne pepper plants with its own peppers going too. I can tell you if there is one thing we know how to grow well it is peppers, cayennes in particular apparently.
A picture of a baby sugar snap pea and a couple of blooms. I've never grown peas of any sort before and was delighted at how pretty the flowers are. They remind me a bit of pansies.
Genovese basil. Not sure if anyone notices or not, but these are also the basils that were started inside.
Winterbor kale. We aren't going to let the kale reach full size, it is sweeter and we personally prefer its texture when in "baby form".
Volunteer catnip! We like to recycle our garden soil each year. We have a huge container that we put all "spent" soil in and then work in fertilizer. It turns out that there were some ungerminated catnip seeds left in our soil container because volunteers have popped up in about three or four different containers. It is doing very well and Brett is getting practice pruning on the catnip. I bet the kitties will be pleased.
Tiger's Eye beans. I am surprised at how many bean pods we have going in this container. These and the dwarf sugar snap peas were not originally intended to be in containers on our porch. We started these (and almost everything we're growing) from seed and they overgrew their starter pots. The problem was it kept raining, raining, raining, and raining some more keeping us from getting our starts in the garden as early as we would have liked. So I transplanted them into pots thinking I could take them down to the garden. But then they started to grow all gnarly, but started to produce, so I decided just to leave them in the containers and see what happened.
At the community garden, we have two plots this year and all the seeds we've sowed have come up! In Plot 1 we have dwarf sugar snap peas, Tiger's Eye beans, Parade cucumbers, Straight Eight cucumbers, butternut squash, and then a small herbs/greens area containing chard, spinach, cumin, Genovese basil, and cilantro. Plot 2 is home to 4 Tigerella tomato plants, 4 Moneymaker tomato plants, 1 Italian Heirloom tomato plant, 2 Green Husk tomatillos plants, and in bewtween are nantes carrots and Clemson Spineless okra. Wahoo!
Next week's garden update may just highlight the container garden again, it depends on what happens with the hay situation at the community garden - unless you all don't mind seeing a slightly weedy garden. :-)
'Til next time!
9 comments:
yay! a garden update. i need to do one... if only i weren't so lazy.
I am sooooo jealous of your garden and container gardens! Everything always sounds (and looks) so lovely...I wish my apt had a deck for containers! I hope all of your crops are successful this year :o)
Courtney
wow, looks so amazing! i am right there with you with all your gardening concerns. mulch sounds good, although the weeds still grew right through my garden even after i mulched. plus my garden is right under a huge maple tree...which means zillions of teeny tiny maples have started growing. yikes. i love that you have the topsy turvy planter! i feel like the tomatoes will just fall off if you're not careful. let us know how that works out.
This reminds me that I need to post pics/updates on my garden. Though with the wet weather, it is nowhere as good as yours... so how is the topsy planter working? I was toying with the idea, but didn't go for it this year. Maybe next year....
Selina - I am all for the lazy - you rock that lazy!
Courtney - :-( I wish you had space for a garden too. We do too, so far things are looking pretty good.
Veggie Vixen - Oh no! Maple seedlings, I bet you battle those just as much as the crabgrass. I was curious as to whether the mulch would really even work as good as they hay.
I still don't quite understand the Topsy Turvy and how the plants are alright. My Dad got it for us for Christmas, he was curious to see if it worked.
Living in a Local Zone - We have had tons of rain here as well, hence our grass battle in the community garden, the container garden is a lot easier to prevent from being overwatered.
Um, honestly, I don't know if the plants are doing what they are supposed to do or not. Right now the plants are trying to grow upwards so we'll have to see what they do next.
Your garden looks great. And your upside-down tomato looks like it's faring better than ours. We tried making a planter from a 2 liter bottle but the tomato really didn't care for it. Is yours still doing well?
Chile - I am assuming the plants are doing what they are supposed to be doing. The are growing quite rapidly, but they are still trying to reach upwards (naturally), and they are getting all gnarly as a result. I imagine that the weight of the fruit will bring the plant down but it certainly won't look like the one in the picture on the box. :-) We'll see.
Brett makes really awesome planters out of 20 oz bottles, we had tomatoes get over a foot tall in them. If you'd like I can have him do a little "how to" post.
Hm, we did ours out of a 2 liter bottle based on directions that Rob linked to a while back. I think heat may have been a problem, but I don't know. I guess I'd want to see a comparison of yield for one in a bottle versus in the ground.
If Brett wants to do a post on "how to" for others, that's great, but I think we're going to pass since we do have the space available in the ground.
It is quite hard to grow vegetables like those. I tried but they didn't grow at all.
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