It’s been a while since I have posted about our gardening adventure…

Our garden last year seemed like it was going to be a great success at my last post. Unfortunately June 2009 brought rain almost every day Due to this most of our tiny seedlings drown or hardly grew at all. The few that did grow struggled because our garden did not have enough sun for a vegetable garden. We were able to grow some flowers and a few green and yellow beans as well as one pepper and a few tiny tomatoes. Our first garden was certainly not the bountiful harvest we were hoping for but we did learn some lessons from this situation. These lessons have helped me to form a new strategy for this year.

Recently I began researching container gardening. It’s a non-traditional approach to gardening but I believe it is a good option for us. Our lease is up in May and we aren’t sure what type of housing we will be in after the move. Not only is container gardening MUCH easier to move it will ensure that we can have a garden no matter what kind of apartment or house we end up at.

Last year my gardening book of choice was “All New Square Foot Gardening” by Mel Bartholomew. I enojoyed the book because it gave planting advice for 1×1 foot areas. Perfect when you only have a small area to garden. Unfortunately this year we have no idea what our available space may be. This year my gardening book of choice is “The Bountiful Container” written by Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey. I have heard good things about this book and the suggestions given in it. I am excited to read it and absorb all of the information.

I knew very little about container gardening before I began researching it. Some of the little information that I did have was that tomatoes and peppers will grow well in containers. I LOVE tomatoes and Jack enjoys different varieties of peppers so I picked up a few varieties of each. Within the next few days we will plant them. We only have one southern facing window in our house so window space is at a premium. Last year our windowsills were very crowded and we had two! To hopefully help with this situation I purchased a small Burpee Seed Starting Greenhouse Kit to try this year. There are two square trays in the kit about 1×1 foot in size. We will likely use only one tray for this planting and I will post pictures as soon as we have them. Hopefully there will be some photos of Jack’s Venus Fly Trap in there too

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 18th, 2010 at 5:41 pm and is filed under Garden 2010, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.