Updates

Yesterday, I transplanted all the zucchini sprouts into their own, individual pots.  I ended up with 14 potted zucchini plants.  One of them had gotten large enough that I probably should've done the transplant sooner, as I ended up breaking some of its roots.  We'll see if it survives.  

And last night, I left all the zukes and the carrots out.  I think we're past all chances of freezing now.  They're sheltered under the eaves on the deck because I knew it was going to rain all night and all day today.  I don't think they're old enough to handle that much extra water.  Anyway, I went out and checked on them this morning and they all seem to be doing fine.

I had a dream last night wherein my mother was asking me if I was ever going to transplant the tomatoes.  Umm, yah.  I do plan to do that soon.  But I need more dirt.

The lettuce seeds I planted on the 22nd starting showing sprouts yesterday.  5 days from planting to sprouting.  Yay.  The new carrot seeds haven't made an appearance yet.  But they're outside now, too, so maybe that will encourage them to poke their heads up.

Part of me wants to plant some other stuff.  Spinach maybe.  I do love me some fresh spinach.  Potatoes?  Strawberries?  We'll see.  This is already a lot of work, so I may not get too far afield of what I've already done.

If you could plant anything you wanted, what would you plant?  What are some of your favorite fresh produces?  

The Containers

If you looked at my pics, you'll notice a variety of containers in my garden.  Right now, there are ice cream containers, and chip containers, and egg crates, and coffee cans and... well, of course, there are actual plant pots.  

Any container will do as long as it's mostly watertight.  You don't want to use anything cardboard, because the water will ruin them lickety-split.  (When means no oatmeal containers.  Bummer.)  The reason I say mostly watertight, is because you still need them all to be able to drain or your poor plants will drown and rot.  

Thus, at the bottom of each of the MacGyver'd containers, I've cut holes to let the water out.  Basically, I used a box cutter to make Xs.  I was going to use the drill with an auger bit, but the damn drill needed charging and I was irritated, so I took the containers into the garage and stabbed them to death.  The extra liquid drains out fine, but I don't lose any of the dirt like I sometimes do with the actual plant pots.

The actual plant pots, by the way, were acquired from every plant I've ever bought for the yard.  And I've planted a lot of stuff in my outside gardens, so I have loads of those things.  (Good thing I'm such a pack rat.)  If you're not a pack rat like me, you really are going to need to either buy containers or use household things to make your garden.  I'm cheap, so buying containers was not happening for me.  

The ice cream buckets... Yeah, I eat a LOT of ice cream, so I already had tons of those.  (Pack rat, remember.)  I still have several I haven't used yet.  Those will all be lettuces.  The chip containers are carrots.  The egg cartons are for starter seedlings - lettuce and tomatoes.  The coffee can has carrots in it, too.  Anything tall will have carrots in it.  Oh, and I totally forgot about the juice cartons.  Those are Tampico Punch - where I cut the tops off.  They're tall, so they work.  And yes, they have holes in the bottoms, too.

Like I said, anything will work.  You do have to consider what kind of vegetable you're planting in each, though.  The zucchinis are in actual pots - low to the ground with plenty of stability so when they go to vine, they won't tip themselves over.  The tomatoes will also be in similar pots - low and stable - so when they get tall, they won't tip over.  Lettuce needs to be in a big enough container to accommodate the size of the adult plant.  And like I said, carrots have to be in a tall enough pot to fit the length of a full grown carrots.  The carrots seeds I bought are supposed to produce 7-8" carrots, so the containers have to be at least that tall.  Don't want mutant carrots.

Sure, I couldn't spent a ton on real pots.  :shrug:  It's just not my style.  The only thing in a store bought pot - one not purchased with a plant already inside - are the baby cedars.  And I had the pot in the garage for years.  I think it used to have a Christmas cactus in it that I transplanted after I bought it.  It died.  Long live the cedars.

What about you?  What kinds of pot ideas would you have if you were going to create a container garden the MacGyver way?  

Container Update - All Pics

Here's the container garden today, taking in the lovely sun.  They'll go back into the garage this evening and stay there through the next few rainy days.  

It doesn't look like much now, but it's going along.  

Update - No Pics

No pictures today because I'm tired and I'm lazy.

I just finished transplanting 6 zucchini plants as a test.  Each one has its own pot now.  If they go well, I'll transplant the others.  They all look good and the root bases for each was deep and plentiful, so fingers crossed.

I tried transplanting the lettuce into separate pots.  This did not go well.  The little lettuces have intertwined their little roots, so if I pull one to plant, they all go.  I may just eat those as seedlings.  I have started another egg carton with lettuce seeds.  We'll see how the next batch go.

I'm terrified to try transplanting the tomatoes yet.  When they get a little bigger, we'll give it a whirl.  And if it screws up, I have more seeds.  

I also planted more carrot seeds.  Three seeds in each Lays Stax plastic tube.  Four tubes set into an ice cream carton for easy transport.

Everything is out on the deck catching some rays now.  They'll all go back in the garage overnight again.  Soon, they'll be put outside and left there.

If nothing else, this is a good way to channel my frustrations with the world.  This I can control.  Well, almost.  Heh.

(PS.  I ate another little lettuce seedling.  Yum.)

Winter Weather Advisory

It's April 19th and we're under a freakin' Winter Weather Advisory for tomorrow afternoon.  It's not supposed to be this cold this late in the season for this far south.  Blerg.

I had hoped to start moving the plants outside.  Lucky for me, I didn't start the process yet and my entire vegetable garden is still in the garage.  It won't be warm in there, but it will remain above freezing.  

I still need to start repotting some of the plants, but that will have to wait until I have more room, which means until after the freeze is over.  

Fingers crossed the flowering plants I have in my outside gardens survive the snap.  One year we had a snap that killed all the blossoms on our redbud tree. That sucked.  This year the redbud is about done blooming, but it has loads of baby leaves.  

Mother Nature is definitely drunk.

Container Garden Update w/ Pics

 Hello again.  I've got the plants out getting some sun right now, so I thought I'd share some pictures of the gang.

Here they all are...

Here's a closer pic of the zukes, the cedars, the tomatoes, and the lettuces...

Here's a closer pic of another zuke and the carrots...

Now that the lettuce is getting multiple leaves, I need to separate them again.  And plant a new round of lettuces.  The carrots are in desperate need of thinning, but I think I might leave these and see what happens.  Meanwhile, I bought another pack of carrot seeds and plan to plant those more judiciously.  Maybe take Janet's suggestion and use a salt shaker.  

I now have at least ten tiny tomato sprouts.  Those are in the egg crate and they'll need to get a bit bigger before I transplant them.  I also have about seven zucchini plants.  Woohoo.  Zukes galore.  I can't wait.  

I feel like a mad scientist.  And I want to plant more stuff!  Bwa ha ha.

Update

I now have 5 tomato seedlings standing about an inch high, and 3 zucchini seedlings just barely poking out of the soil.  The lettuce is growing right along.  The main carrot pots look fine and more than ready to be thinned.  

The transplanted carrots look like hell, though.  

I have been playing with the idea of NOT thinning all the carrot pots.  You know, just to see what happens.  Will I end up with a bunch of small carrots?  Will they just not grow?  Stay tuned.

The Container Garden Spreadsheet

Okay, so I thought of doing a spreadsheet to chart my progress with the container garden.  Yeah, if you don't know me, I'm a big spreadsheet person.  Anyway, it looks like this:

Pretty snazzy, eh?

I didn't say it would be exciting.  Although, I did think about color coding it.  We'll see.

It's not hard to follow.  The day something happened, what it happened to, and what happened.  L is lettuce, T is tomatoes, C is carrots, Ce are the little cedar trees - which are doing well, by the way.  The taller of the two has new growth at the top.  Squee.

This should help me keep track of what's going on, time spans between planting and sprouting and replanting, leading to eventual harvest.  

It's not on there, but I'm watering once every day to two days in the garage, and I had to water them twice the day they were outside enjoying the sun.  We'll see if the transplanted carrots recover and whether they actually become normal carrots.

You'll note I also mentioned other stuff I planted that isn't in the container garden - the peony and the flower seeds.  That's just so I can keep track of that stuff, too, without building another spreadsheet.  

Anyway, this is me.  Hopefully it helps my journey and doesn't become a pain in the buns.  And that I remember to keep it updated.  :fingers crossed:

Oh, and if you want to follow this blog, all the way at the bottom there's a spot to do that.  

Now, I should probably try to get some sleep before Monday actually comes and I have to do work or something.

The Journey's Beginning

Off and on last year, Hubs and I talked about ways to make ourselves more self-sufficient and growing our own food was always right near the top of the list.  

First, we considered clearing part of the yard to make a regular garden or a terraced garden because we live on a hill.  Unfortunately, we live in an area replete with critters - deer, rabbits, squirrels, opossums, raccoons...  And since we put out food for the critters, thus inviting them into our yard, we realized that in order to have a regular garden we would have to go to the trouble of putting a tall fence around the whole damn thing.  

Now, if you're new to me, I'm lazy.  The mere thought of all the work involved in putting in a regular garden was daunting by itself.  Add in a fence and I balked.  

Then I stumbled on the idea of container gardening.  We have a large deck off the SE side of the house, which is easily 6+" off the ground in the back.  It gets pretty okay sun.  Some days and times of day are better than others, but all in all, it should be a good spot to grow things.  I also already had many many containers of various sizes.  I'm a bit of a hoarder.  I have old plastic ice cream containers, and potato chip tubes and coffee canisters, and all the actual plastic pots anything I ever planted came in.  

So, once I made the decision to go 'full container gardening', I picked up seeds and dirt.  (I don't even want to begin to figure out how to grow without dirt.)  I also started saving egg cartons.  (I hoard, but I'm not insane, so I didn't already have those tucked away.)  

To start, I got tomatoes, carrots, and lettuce - all in seed form.  A salad garden, if you will.  I put the tomatoes and the lettuce into the egg cartons.  I planted the carrots directly into the pots they will spend their whole lives in.  Later, I also got zucchini seeds and put those directly into pots.  Then I put all the pots, etc. on shelves in front of the windows in my garage - those are all south facing.  (One window already had a shelf, and Hubs built the other for me.)  

When the lettuce got large enough, I transplanting the seedlings into containers of their own.  For those, I picked plastic, gallon, ice cream containers.  Three groups in each container.

I attempted transplanting carrots yesterday... There's a reason why they say you can't do that.  Carrot roots at that age are like fine white threads.  They don't go back into the dirt as straight as they were coming out.  I might end up with some funky mutant carrots there.  We'll see.  

I also made a spreadsheet to track all the goings-on.  Again, I'll talk about that another time.  Probably tomorrow.

I'm going to try to remember to take pictures to document the process along the way.  If I'd thought about this blog when I first started my container garden, I would've taken pics then.  But I didn't.  Sorry about that.  

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask.  And feel free to tell me about your journeys as we go along.  I'd also be open to guest posts, if you feel like you have something to share that others might value.  

Oh, and from time to time, there will be short posts here - Thoughts (if I think of something interesting) and Notes (little bits of what I've discovered).  

As with my other blogs, comments here will be moderated.  (They weren't yesterday, but they are today.)  I don't tolerate crap on my blogs.

Anyway, this should be fun and a learning experience.  Let's go.

Note

 Carrot sprouts taste like a little burst of carrot flavor.  Lettuce sprouts are tasty, too.

Thought

Thought:  You know those long plastic containers Lays Stax potato chips come in?  Take a half dozen or so, cut drain holes in the bottoms, fill them with dirt, and plant carrots in each of those.  You can keep them from falling over by putting all the long containers into a larger container or by tying them together with twine.  

The Beginnings of Growth

 Let's start out with some pictures...  

Those are my carrots.

These are my lettuces.

Both the carrots and the lettuce are 14 days old.  The lettuce started out in an egg carton and were transplanted into ice cream tubs at 9 days old.  I attempted transplanting carrots this morning.  Note: There's a reason why they say you can't transplant carrots.  Their roots are like fine white hairs at this point and I don't think it's humanly possible to get those roots straight so they can grow into nice carrots.  We'll see.  I may have to simply thin those out and be satisfied with only a few carrots reaching maturity instead of the plethora of shoots that came up.

I also have three containers with zucchinis planted - 6 seeds per container - and an egg carton with tomato seeds planted.  One tomato showed itself this morning.  15 days out.  Slow pokes.  

The zucchinis were planted later than the rest, so it's only been 7 days.  

I have a spreadsheet to keep track of the dates and progress.  I'll talk about that another time.

I'm also keeping track of two cedar seedlings. I pulled them out of my flower gardens and transplanted them into a pot.  They're only about 2 inches high, but I hope to get them big enough to put into the north side of our yard.  

Let's face it, folks, I'm a writer by nature not a farmer, so there's every possibility I will totally screw this up.  Every regular veggie garden I've ever planted was a bust.  But hey, if it works, we'll have fresh veggies without having to trek to the store.  Fingers crossed.

Welcome to The Totally Amateur Container Gardener

Hey all,

I'm trying something out here.  This is a way for me to keep track and make notes about my new hobby of container gardening.  Nothing fancy.  Just me talking about my journey so 1) I don't forget, 2) I can look back and see what worked and what didn't for next year, 3) help anyone else who might be thinking about doing this, too.

Heh, like I don't already have enough to do.  

Stay tuned for posts and updates as I progress.  There will probably be a lot of posts right up front and then maybe only occasionally.  With photos, if I remember to take them.  

-B.E.