23,948 Garden Web Discussions | Vegetable Gardening
Thanks for the clarification, Slimy_Okra! Common names can be tricky. What I was told are Cape Gooseberries are commonly called "Giant Ground Cherries".
I'm happy to grow either that I can find, although it sounds like I'd have better luck with Ground Cherries (vs. Cape Gooseberries)
wayne -- how funny, leave to me to go crazy trying to buy a "weed"! :)
Nothing says you have to fill the bucket full of mix. If the buckets are what you have to use, for shallow rooted plants, 1/2 full works fine.
But if you do fill it when planting shallow rooted plants you don't have to water it as often since the extra soil retains more water.
Dave
I just checked my basil from last year. The roots filled the tall #5 nursery pots. (5 gal buckets hold more soil than a #5 nursery container.) The longest root measured 17 inches.
The basil in smaller containers did not do as well as the basil in the #5's.
I water the containers every day in the heat of the summer and the smaller containers were difficult to keep up with. My location is warm to hot,dry and windy.
Zeuspaul
Thanks for the reply. Im in Orange County, Ca. The mulch cover is black. Since my City Pick planter is self watering, just like the Earthbox, I top it off every day. If there's too much it'll drain through the over flow then retain water. Soil im using is the Miracle Grow organic potting mix. I have yet to add in EB Stone organic vegetable food.
The last week temps have been around mid to high 80s. From the research I've read that the water evaporates from the plants cells causing the limp look. Once night comes around or early morning they look great again.
Might want to do some reading about the problems associated with using granular organic fertilizers in containers, especially small ones such as this. Since there is no soil food web, no beneficial bacteria or microorganisms to convert the supplements to a useable form for the plants, you need to either add the bacteria and other needed soil organisms or use liquid fertilizers and you have to feed them frequently. .
Gardening organically in a container is a very different ballgame than organic gardening in ground.
As for the black cover rather than remove it just spread some mulch on top of it to reduce the heat.
Dave
"I do not use chives a lot ..." Ah, but up until now you haven't had a good fresh supply at hand. You'll be adding them to all sorts of things soon. BTW don't ever cook them. Add them to cold foods or right before serving. They go with almost anything salady, eggy, mayonnaisey, tomatoey, cheesy, potatoey, pastaey, fishy ...... Don't wait until you find a recipe. Just chuck them in. Experiment.
Artichoke is something nobody mentioned. It can be added to landscape features and is very easy. Plus, I get 15-20 artichokes off of one good producer. Some of those are smaller but they are the best ones. Artichoke is very expensive so it's worth the space.
I love chard and always have it both in the flower beds and garden. There's only a couple of months that I can't grow it during Phoenix hot summer. I suspect you could grow it year around. And, a tiny bunch of chard is $1.99 in my store. The plant is long-lived ( I had one last 2 years!) and cut-come again. We can eat chard almost everyday, lightly stir fried with a tiny bit of EVOO, than used for a bed for poached eggs. I do the same with spinach, which I've had good luck with, even though it's only for a month or two.
Peppers and tomatoes have such variety. Peppers and eggplants grow very well for me, although I don't have great luck with tomatoes due to heat and spider mites. You might find peppers and eggplants will grow for years if you don't get freezing weather! I have a four year old pepper and my oldest eggplant lived three years before it froze!
Beets and carrots. A lot for little space.
Herbs-cilantro and parsley in winter and basil in summer. Rosemary, oregano and thyme are good all year. Mint always dies for me in August but we really enjoy mint chutney so I plant it every fall.
If you have room, consider pomegranate ,fig and citrus trees. Maybe mango,too. And guava, which can grow like a weed in the right climate.
How do you tell if a broccoli plant is buttoning? My Packman seedlings were about four weeks old and appeared healthy when I put them out on April 11. On April 15 we had an inch of snow and a night time low of 22. It was fairly warm before and after that, and I only saw some minor signs of stress for a day (a couple purple leaves). Now, two weeks after planting out, they appear to be forming heads although they are only about six inches in diameter. Is that buttoning? Or just the beginning of a real head?
That's a very sturdy frame. You could probably fence it off with chicken wire and raise chickens.
But as for vining veggies, many would still need finer things to vine on than a 2x4. If you can add that, then I would definitely suggest one of the large melon or pumpkin/squash families, since that is so strong. Canteloupe or honeydew would be something you could grow on there.
I will say that the sturdiness of your frame is just about right. Last fall, we had a large Bradford pear tree get spapped off in a wind storm, as well as half a Norway maple. Each of my next door neighbors lost a spruce. All tress over 20 years old. And this was not a tornado, or even a thunderstorm. It's now part of the "Hauntd Ohio" lore.
(I know, the lawn needs some nitrogen, and the tree was not rotted or insect infested. The wood is as soilid as a baseball bat.)
On second thought, you might want to add some flying buttresses.
This post was edited by terry_neoh on Fri, Apr 25, 14 at 12:10
There is a container gardening forum on this website. You may also want to ask there. I grew carrots in a wine barrel once. They did pretty well. I just used plain old potting mix.
That moisture control mix by Miracle Grow is a little weird to me. Have you ever seen it soaked? Big gloppy ice cube looking chunks, that may be harmless, but I found it a little startling. I bought a bag at Costco and now use it mostly for ornamentals.
I didn't figure out what that ice-cube glob is either, but it only seems to have showed up the first time when the soil gets really wet.
OP, you're a good parent to get all those ingredients for the kids. Some adult gardeners don't or can't even get all those things in the first go-around. :-)
Some soil mixes already have fertilizer or plant food, so there is that option also.
Creativeguy: I went vertical last year with some hale's best. And you're right, you can use slings to support them. When they were about 3-4" in diameter, I used old pantyhose as slings. Nice and stretchy so it didn't inhibit growth. IIRC, these were spaced about 15". Should have spaced them about 18" or so just to make manipulating the vines through the netting a little easier. You'll want to go a lot higher than 4 feet though. This was 10" and they easily grew to the top.
Kevin
Thanks, all. My hope was to encourage the vines to spread laterally rather than upward on the trellis, which is how I grow my cucumbers. At the end of the day, I guess the plants themselves will let me know what they need and I can always add some height to my cattle panels. Nc-cm, my plan for the large melons is to put them on small adjustable height "stools" I'm welding up. Picture a tall stake with a frame atop and some old cut up rope hammock stretched over the frame. I'll train the vines onto the trellis and wherever a watermelon forms I'll set up a support for it. This is all to help streamline my lawncare... things got unmanageable growing pumpkins and melons on the ground last year, and I have little time as it is for such things. More time spent gardening and playing with my kids, less time mowing and such is the goal. Again, i appreciate the advice!
Sometimes I have noticed that plants that didn't get a lot of top growth will actually be doing something else -- getting a lot of root growth.
An example of this is when you buy starter packs from the stores. They may have remained at 4-6" at the store, and even at home when you bring it home and didn't transplant yet. But when you finally get to it, boy oh boy, there is a lot of roots in that little starter cell.
Same case for when you buy starter plants, transfer them to you yard, but the weather is still not yet optimal for growing. They sit in your yard for a while and look like nothing is happening up top, but they are definitely growing roots down below.
I just wanted to revisit problem #1 again: "Its been 3 weeks and The ones in the raised beds haven't grown at all with the exception of one tomato plant that grew 2 inches."
You mentioned that there is grass under the raised beds. It may take a while for the vegetable plants to take hold. Sometimes when I've covered grass for 3 weeks, its still popped back to life! It takes a while for the grass to die. In the meantime, your poor seedlings are fighting to get through the grass and establish their roots. The grass (and then the dead grass) actually will temporarily form a barrier, inhibiting root growth until the grass is dead and decaying.
I am left feeling that some book out there has misled a lot of new gardeners
I blame Pinterest for showing so many raised beds. :)
There are places where it's required ... poor soil and/or a bad back.
It also makes the garden look tidier.
I just installed "raised" beds for my chilis and herbs, sort of. It's more a mulch retainer than anything.
Here is a link that might be useful: My
I put bird netting over that bed last d ight and it appears nothing was eaten!! Could be a fluke. Guess we will see!!
Crossing fingers!