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.