|
I'm a bit behind on this topic, somehow I never saw this until today!
But FWIW ...
I started gardening in pots. After much experimentation, I found that everything grew best in 15 gallon pots. The other thing that worked well for some herbs and leaf lettuce was rectangular window boxes. I think the thing is the roots really need to stretch out. I never had the success with 1, 2, and 5 gallon pots the way I did with the 15 gallon ones.
I went to my local nursery and asked if they had any of those black industrial pots. They're not recycleable, generally cannot be returned to the vendor and are just thrown into the trash. Not great for the environment, but great for me as at $4.00 per pot they were definitely in my price range (compared to the pretty pots going for $35.00 and up per pot).
I chose to use organic potting soil, but when money became an issue I got the "cheap stuff" from my local mega-store and didn't notice a difference in production.
I DID however ALWAYS use top-notch organic fertilizers. I prefer the Dr. Earth brand, although I'm sure there are many great ones out there.
Potting soil needs to be replentished frequently. Many folks told me I needed to dump the whole thing out once a year or so, but mostly I just added new, mixed in compost and fertilizer and did great.
In a spot the size of my mid-sized sedan, I grew more veggies, fruits and herbs than I could eat on my own. Back in the days I ate meat, sometimes I would trade some lettuce for some chicken breast! And for all my neighbors that ate fish, I always asked for the raw parts (head, tail, etc.) and would bury them with the heavy-feeders like tomatoes and corn. (That way I didn't have to give fish emulsion as much - a couple heads and tails would do the trick for the bulk of the season.)
For our current garden, it's 8'x10', started off as clay, now is rich, fluffy, and lovely. We planted directly in the ground, and use the same fertilizer and compost as when I grew things in pots. We have such an explosion of year-round produce, it's amazing! (Although we do have some things in pots that are perennial plants, like certain herbs, another container for asparagus, a few containers for berries).
We don't plant in rows, but use the Square Foot Gardening method written by Mel Bartholomew in his books and websites. While he recommends raised beds and a lot of mixing and adding to get it going, we didn't do that. We use a lot of his concepts and our garden is the most amazing yet (and we just fully implemented it 1 year ago!).
We also use concepts of Companion Planting to get maximum produce, such as planting onions with lettuce, cilantro and other fast growing plants with slower growing tomatoes, planting lettuce and other cool crops in the shade of tall crops to get year-round production - and also NOT planting carrots by our potatoes, as while carrots love tomatoes, apparently they don't love potatoes.
Anyway, that's what we're doing, and trying to grow everything we eat regularly from our garden. For things we eat less often (like eggplant) or can't keep up with (like zucchini) we figure we'll just buy it. We plan to dehydrate a lot too, for such seasonal things as berries and tomatoes.
Eventually I want to get into community partnership with other gardners - that way we can trade some of our explosion of lettuce and tomatoes for things like zucchini and avocados.
|
(10)
Linear Mode
