Monday, March 29, 2010

Container Garden

I've decided to start a container garden this year, as my patio gets just enough light to get "stuff" to grow. I had started some stuff from seed, but only the tomatoes and peppers made it.

I planted a strawberry pot with lots of herbs, and another strawberry pot with strawberries. I have an Early Girl tomato that I bought from Home Depot, as I don't have faith in my tomatoes that I planted. I also bought another pepper plant, so I think I'll be making a lot of fajitas, chili, sloppy joes, and stuffed peppers with all the peppers I'll be harvesting.

My favorite roses are the Peace rose, and I bought one to plant. My track record with miniature roses is an across-the-board failure though, so we'll see what happens. I also bought a packet of Crystal Palace Lobelia to plant under the rose; I think it will make it look really nice.

I hope this experiment turns out well. If the strawberries don't last through the year I'll probably try alpine strawberries next year in the strawberry pot. I tried some years ago when I was in Amsterdam and thought they were delightful.

Here are some container garden resources:

Container Vegetable Gardening - from Ohio State University
Vegetable Gardening in Containers - from Texas A&M (pdf)

2 comments:

Krista said...

I planted a few things in pots too for our small backyard. I don't have much faith in their success, but we will see.

Good luck!

Diane Lowe said...

Thanks Krista! Good luck with your garden too!

So far things have been looking all right; other than killing off all of my herb seedlings I haven't had any other dramatic disasters.

I'll probably update this post with photos when I get around to taking them. I'm particularly proud of my herb pot (even though I didn't technically grow any of those plants, they have transplanted well).

The other day I came home and I found a handful of ladybugs hanging out around my pots; they haven't left yet. It was really delightful and totally made my day.