This past Monday I took advantage of my day off to do something I love but moreover something I'd been needing to do for a couple of weeks. My summer patio vegetable garden experiment had started to wind down after my cucumber and squash plants croaked and the tomato plant got all spindly. I have about 16 or 17 pots available and I wanted to try to use those so I didn't have to spend any money on anything except the components for my soil mix and maybe a couple packets of seeds. As far as I am concerned as long as I have a superior soil mix I have a good chance of success. Summer vegetables are generally BIG and the pots I had really weren't sufficient to support the big vines characteristic of a lot of the stuff I had planted. I have hope for a better fall "crop" given the fact that one 10- 12" pot should be okay for individual green leafy vegetable plants.
Fall is my favorite time to plant anyway. It is low maintenance, and as soon as plants like collards and kale are mature you can just take what you need, leave the plant and it will continue to grow leaves that you can continue to harvest. Here in GA these hardy leafy plants fair well over winter and I can usually harvest from them until they bolt in hotter Spring weather.
For soil I did a modified Mel's Mix recommended for square foot gardens (SFG) which is what I had before when we lived in our house. Mel's mix is typically 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost and 1/3 peat moss. I chose to do 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 mushroom compost and 1/3 steer manure. When I started my SFG at my house I did this same mix but with peat moss in place of vermiculite. I had great results. I think also the higher level of nutrients in the soil with my modified mix will be beneficial given that I have things in pots and not in a larger bed.
We still have sweet potatoes (4 big pots) growing... I am waiting a bit to harvest them. There are also 4 plants down in the community garden that I think will be decent as well. Everything else down there has been pulled out.
All in all we have...
4 collard plants
4 red cabbage plants
8 sweet potato plants (and lots of tubers by now, just waiting a little before harvesting)
2 mustard greens from seed
2 turnips from seed (won't do much with the turnips but I can harvest the greens at least)
3 spinach from seed
tons of radishes
2 rosemary still growing + basil is struggling along
It's not much but it's enough to keep me going. If the light is low enough and the community garden spot gets enough sun I might consider going down there to put some plants in but I'd have to redo the soil mix and that's EXPENSIVE!
Anyway, we took some photos of the process...
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| here are things BEFORE... mixing the soil components and cleaning out pots |
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| our shovel = fireplace shovel. yep. |
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| Shiloh on camera duty... |
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| dumping soil mix into pots... |
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| ...and smoothing out, ready to plant |
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| best thing in the world. wish you could see the shimmer of the vermiculite... |
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| she's finished! |
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| happy and dirty :) |
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| freshly watered... |
