What?! What?! In The...

Containers.  Get your mind out of the gutter all you Tosh.0 fans.  Alright, I know I've fallen down hard on blogging lately, but I'm back from vacation and caught up on all the life stuff so back to it!  This post is the last round of veggie plantings I did right before going on vacation during the last week of May so I can tell you now how they're doing, and I also did some updates on the other containers I planted earlier in the season.

Fairy Tale Eggplant from Burpee

Fairy Tale Eggplant.  This is an eggplant variety I got from Burpee that is made for containers.  It's a smaller marbled eggplant.  I did a very basic planting on this one with rocks in the bottom layer for proper drainage and potting soil.  I also have a black beauty eggplant (the classic large dark purple variety) growing in the raised garden bed so I'm excited to compare the two throughout the summer.  This week I checked and the container has these beautiful purple and white blooms on it so it's going strong!  Actually doing better than the black beauty plant, which has grown but has no buds yet.

Peppers in a Gardener's grow bag

Peppers.  Alright, next up is my peppers!  As you know, I started these bad boys from seeds, they're the only thing I did from seed this year that wasn't simple "sow in ground" and needed to be started in advance of growing season.  One is a mildly hot pepper, the other is a sweet pepper.  Sadly, due to lack of a proper labeling at the seedling stage, I have no idea which one is which.  The idea was that I'd have the hot pepper in the red grow bag and the sweet pepper in the blue grow bag.  Once they start growing actual peppers I'll find out if my guess was right or not!  Generally the hot pepper plants are smaller so I did my guess based on which set of seedlings looked larger overall.  As you can see, for these guys I tried a Gardener's grow bag.  They're about $10 each, can be reused for 2 seasons, and are supposed to provide the perfect amount of moisture retention and aeration for the roots.  Very easy to use and keep their shape pretty well.  The main difference in these is you're supposed to use pre-moistened dirt while filling it.  I just filled and watered the dirt as I went every couple of inches.  We shall see.  The plants are about a month in so far and to be honest, the peppers in the back yard are doing better.  These are doing fine, but no buds yet and the backyard most are budding.  This weekend I'm going to try adding more dirt to them since I think with the watering they're planted a bit shallow now. 

Sweet Potatoes in a Gardener's grow bag

Sweet Potatoes.  Alas, the piece de resistance, my sweet potatoes!  I have high hopes for these bad boys because a) they were expensive since you have to buy tubers, and b) potatoes store really well so I could feast all year round!  As you can see, I did another grow bag for these, it's much larger than the pepper grow bag and is designed for potatoes.  I planted 7 tubers here, and a few in the backyard as well for comparison.  They look quite withered and dying here, but no worries, the directions ensured me that no matter how gross/stinky they are when you get them, they bounce back very quickly once planted.  They insist that you put one tuber in a soda bottle with water inside to see the pretty foliage grow from it...but alas, I was running behind on packing so I neglected to do that.  So far, about a month out from planting now, it appears that only 3 of the tubers really survived in the grow bag.  They're growing, but not much, so I'm imagining my sweet potato project may be a failure.  I've been told they only grow in hotter climates than mine, but the Baltimore/DC area is pretty darn disgusting in the summer so I disregarded the online naysayers.  It's over 100 degrees here today!  I may attempt to move the bag to my driveway to do some real spud frying heat of the bag, but we'll see.

Carrots and Onions!  Looking Good!

Update on Carrots and Onions.  Looking good right?  I'm fairly certain I need to thin the carrots out, but I have yet to research how.  So they may come up all scary and deformed looking.  I'm going to try to check in on them this weekend. 

Peas-pretty much done for this round

Update on Peas-In-A-Pot.  Well they've been in the pot for a while now and in this picture from the beginning of June they are starting to turn yellow and stop producing.  Truth be told, they produced a decent number of pods for one person for snacking but it's not like you could make a meal out of them.  And according to smart gardener its time to plant another pot full peas, so I guess they only produce for a month or so and you keep replanting like lettuce.  Sadly, I may have/did leave the seeds out in the yard and ruined them.  A week after this picture was taken the pot was totally dead.

Strawberries-a little dry on the bottom row

Update on Strawberries.  Well the lazy strategy isn't working out so well.  The plants on the bottom are drying out a lot no matter how often I water them so I've been reduced to using watering bulbs just to try to get water to them.  It seems to be working okay but is far more of a pain in the arse to refill every couple days than if I'd just created the PVC pipe with holes in the center so that water would easily travel down to them.  So alas, laziness did not pay off in the end.




That's all for today folks!  I'm going to try to start doing side by sides of container plants with their garden bed counterparts to show the comparison in how well they're doing.

Wet N Wild

One new thing I'm trying this year is an attempt to take watering out of the garden failure equation.  Last year I definitely killed many plants during the drought by failing to water them often enough.  The best time to water plants is in the morning so they get the water before the soil gets too hot so it doesn't all evaporate before getting to the roots.  At night the opposite problem occurs and it's too cold to evaporate all the water sitting on the plant or the base of the roots, which leads to root rot and mold or mildew.  Of course during a true heat wave you should water your plants every day or at least every other day, but taking the extra 15 minutes in the morning when I have to leave for work at 7:00 AM did not happen.

Watering timer.

Soaker hose packaging.

The project this year started when I got a water timer for my spigot.  I had planned to connect the timer to basic sprinklers but realized for my patio garden I'd also be watering my patio furniture cushions; not a feature I was looking for.  So I started researching other methods and decided on soaker hoses instead of sprinklers. Soaker hoses help try to prevent the problem of having water sitting on the leaves or base of the roots leading to root rot by letting water seep into the ground rather than spraying the whole plant.  You can even bury soaker hoses in the ground to get them right on the roots.  The packaging recommends covering them with mulch because the sun can degrade them but I haven't gotten around to it and for $12 to replace it I figure buying mulch is more expensive anyways and I'm feeling lazy this season on the mulch front.  If they become clogged you remove the endcap and let the water run through like a normal hose.  Also, they supposedly are great for the environment because you need to use far less water when its soaking in straight at the roots slowly.

I ran one basic garden hose to my front yard and one hose to my backyard vegetable garden bed, and attached to those hoses I have soaker hoses.  The 50' soaker hose I got  cost $12, the two spigot water timer was $40, and regular garden hoses range from about $10-$30 depending on how long of a hose you need before you get to the garden where you place the soaker hose.  So all in all, a relatively inexpensive option to take watering out of the equation and save your plants.

I've tried it out for a few weeks and so far I really like it.  You choose how long you want the timer to water for spigot 1 and spigot 2 (I chose 30 minutes each), how often (I chose every four days), and what time of day (I chose 5:30 a.m. for spigot 1 and 6:00 a.m. for spigot 2).  It has a rain delay function where you simply push + to delay the watering cycle from 12 to I believe 48 hours if it happens to rain and your plants don't need it.  It was very, VERY easy to program and I did it in about 5 minutes.  The only recommendation on the soaker hoses is that they don't lay flat after being packaged in a circle for their whole life because unlike a garden hose they're very lightweight so take them out of the packaging and stretch them flat for a few days if you can before trying to place them.

Soaker hose in raised veggie garden.

Soaker hose running past my strawberries to front garden

The hose to my front garden can run right along the side of the house so there is no problem with mowing.  In the veggie garden however, the hose has about ten feet to go between the side of the house and the actual garden where the soaker hose is placed over my lawn.  Thankfully I tend to mow my own lawn but if you have to run the hose over an area where a landscaper may accidentally shred it with a mower you can put up a small border fence to run with the hose so they have to stop and see that there's a hose.  You can easily disconnect it from the soaker hose so it's not disturbed or lift it up and mow under it quickly.  If you're not using a timer you can always simply leave the soaker hose placed in your garden and attach the garden hose to it each time you want to water.

Here's hoping we get a hot summer so I get a good "test" year in for the soaker hose/water timer experiment!