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.