The Potatoes Actually Grew!!!

What you see here are 3.25 pounds of potatoes which grew from 3 or 4 teeny pieces of potatoes and required NO effort on my part.  They were in a 4 gallon bucket (hole in bottom) placed (strategically) under a dripping upside down tomato bag.  Wa hoo!

No weeding, no bugs, no spray, no watering, JUST POTATOES!

Yesterday being the end of July, I tallied our monthly yield.  We did almost 35 pounds, for a total this year of just over 50.  Not close to the folks in CA who have 10k as a goal for their 1/5 acre farmlet, but hey, for us it’s awesome!

The Amazing 5 Gallon Detergent Bucket

You are probably getting tired of this particular bucket, but it amazes me.  It was picked from a friend’s trash heap, then I planted a huge, awesome looking cucumber (which turned out to be a pepper plant).  Next, I planted pretty flowers on top to keep moisture loss down.  Then, I added used up jiffy pots as another moisture keeper.  Except that they weren’t used up.  It turns out that some lurking seeds were waiting to sring into action.  Here you see a Delicata squash with 2 huge fruit growing off of the top.  The peppers are growing well too.  Four new babies are growing from the bottom.

Just to the left of this bucket is a 4 gallon bucket with a grape tomato on the bottom (very prolific, already given about 50 tomatoes), and on top is a bird house gourd and red basil.  These are all part of my experiment to see how much is too much.  How much one teeny container can grow without committing suicide.  We are still weighing the produce.  For all of June our total output was 15 pounds.  We did that in about 2 days for July.

I Never Thought I Would be Excited by a Salad!

(But I am!)  This one has the following ingredients from our garden:

Lettuce, spinach, sweet basil, red basil, celery, carrots, green pepper, summer squash, broccoli, grape tomatoes, cucumber.  That’s ELEVEN things!  Wow!!!  I used to hate the very concept of gardening.  Forced as a child to labor and all.  And thanks to Tom, this is all ORGANIC too!  Double wow!

Lest you be too dazzled, I need to point out that there is a fair amount of iceburg lettuce mixed in.  The next batch of “my” lettuce won’t be ready for a few days.  Still, this rocks!

Today I made cucumber pickles with my container cukes and the huge green pepper from my upside down pepper grower.  I could have used our own onions but they are not quite ready.  Can’t wait to try it.  Also, last night in a fit of desparately not wanting to waste perfectly good sourdough bread that no one was going to eat, I cut it up and made croutons.  They were delicious.  I will make a salad tonight with them.  I also picked a pound of broccoli this morning.  Tom wants that for dinner.

Monday I used the dehydrater to dry summer squash slices (some with popcorn seasoning, some with salt and pepper), the rest of a can of mushrooms, and some grape tomatoes (very prolific, also from upside down planter).  The tomatoes were awesome!  So sweet, chewy, like little Starburst (which I hate), but tomato-ish.  Yum.  I can’t believe these words are even coming out of me.

The Side Yard

Here you see the Tomato Tree, with it’s 4 buckets.  Tom has the 2 green ones, I have the buckets, five gallon this year.  His are fancy self watering kinds with wicks, mine the old fashion kind, with crops on top to retain moisture.  One is marigolds, the other sweet basil.  Both have flowers.

To the left you can see some tomatoes which I grew from seed.  Some started in bottles and some in jiffy pots.  One of the vine tomatoes is in a self watering container, the other just a bucket.  I put them side by side for comparison.  We are keeping track of dates and yields and stuff to see what works next year.

We did get some bunches of grapes.  I am off to pick some leaves to freeze.  I do love stuffed grape leaves!

This is All Planted Now

This is the Square foot garden which is now ALL planted!  The back row has two grape vines and a clematis.  The front row is marigolds, behind that are 4 of the broccoli from the “broccoli experiment”, they are doing better than the ones with the blueberries, but not nearly as well as the ones in the SWC’s.  Other than the chive you see, which I just divided into 4 other clumps, the blank spaces are filled with cutting flower.  To the right is the potato bag row (an upcoming post on this will explain!)

The Other Side Yard

On the far right is a blackberry bush in a cut up barrel.  Beyond that is a lasagna bed with 5 blackberry and five raspberry canes, some lillies, and a cabbage.  To the left is a rain barrel and a yet unplanted lasagna bed.

The side yard

Here you see the five blueberry bushes in 1/3 55 gallon barrels, the one at the far right also has 2 of the broccoli plants.  They have NOT grown at all.  (Blueberry soil to acidic perhaps)?

To the left of the shed are two bean poles, wired to the containers, a square foot garden (originally 4 X 4 – but that wood rotted so Tom boxed it in with newer wood making it now 5 X 5).  Just past that is his new 4 X 8 raised bed.

Broccoli Experiment

These SWC are made from one, two and three liter bottles.  I had nine plants and decided to see how they would grow in containers.  My goal is to see how much nutrition I can get from as little space and effort as possible.  The one on the left is by far the biggest, the ones in the ground are about half this size.  Will they catch up?  Who will win?  We shall see…

(PS  the gray thing on the right is a solar light.  We wanted something that could charge by day and be easily portable into the house in case of power failure.  These are great!  The base is granite, and the light is very bright.  More than enough to read or play games by.  We’ll see how durable they are.)

55 Gallon Drum Planter

If you look closely, you will see that this is one 55 gallon barrel on the bottom.  Part of it has been spray painted silver with a “plastic” spray paint.  If I am going to fill my yard with white barrels and pieces of white barrels, I don’t want it to look like my yard is full of white barrels! 

On top of that barrel is the bottom third of another barrel.  I haven’t decided if I want to make a SWC out of this or just drill drainage on the bottom and sides.  I was thinking this would be a neat eye level container for low maintenance things like carrots, onions, or herbs, that would add interest and height to the rain barrel area.

I plan on having 3 barrels right here, connected by hoses, raised on cinder blocks, with the overflow of the main barrel aimed at the raspberry bed.  What do you think?

I am also dreaming of a strawberry bed made of – what else – barrels, as well as a compost tumbler and, in deference to Tom’s new “special interest”, chicken nesting boxes.  That last one is also waiting for me to design a chicken tractor to go along with it which will be portable and maneuverable to put over the “conventional” raised beds that we have.

Make a Self Watering Container Out of Anything

I think that it is just too long to say “Self Watering Container” over and over, so I am going to abbreviate to “SWC”.  And I am too lazy to use caps all the time so it may end up being “swc”.

I have been obsessed with making self watering containers.  Among the list of things that are included in my reasons for “never saying never” are these:  “I will never make a quilt” and “I will never garden”.  In years past I left the gardening to Tom.  As in, “if you want to garden, go ahead”.  And I let him.  But now with the state of the world the way it is, I am increasingly concerned with our ability/capability to produce our own food.

And I am increasingly concerned that others may have the capability to grow their own food and NOT KNOW IT, (that is, not know that they are capable).  For me, a major obstacle to garden success was remembering to water.  Hence my motivation to develop easy SWCs.  First, I thought big, ie 55 gallon drums, but now I am thinking big and little,  drums and used containers, treasure from trash, etc.

We have looked at our property with new eyes, planted trees, bushes, fruits and veggies, as well as some herbs and flowers.  But one thing is leading to another.  How to water.  Where to get water in case of drought.  How to store/preserve.  How to fertilize/repel pests.  Questions, questions.

Which leads me back to this picture.  A simple juice bottle which was cut up and inverted.  Holes were placed with a soldering iron for overflow and a watering tube.  Broccoli was planted.  It turns out that broccoli plants come in 9 packs, so what to do with the other 8 plants?  I put some in with a blueberry bush, some in my square foot garden, and made some smaller SWCs for experimentation.

I want to find the easiest, most nutrient dense food that can be grown with the most ease.  A daunting challenge?  I’ll let you know…