Garden Time!

We really love vegetables in our house. As nice as it is to walk into a store and see bins of fresh produce, nothing beats vegetables fresh from the garden. We aren’t lucky enough to live in a place where we can plant a garden directly into the ground. After some deliberation, we decided that container gardening is the way we want to go. It gives us some pretty solid flexibility, and you’d be surprised by how large a harvest you can get from container gardening. The other nice part about container gardening is that we have the ability to move the containers when the weather gets unpredictable (Texas weather anyone?).

March is one of my favourite months because we start the garden. We both love English peas, but the season for them in Texas is really short. We usually plant these in late February and then plant anything else we’re interested in later in the season. The icy weather this year changed our plans a bit, and instead of just planting the peas, we decided to plan and plant everything in one go.

We are lucky enough to live in an area that has a lot of resources available on plants that do well in our area as well as in containers, so that took out a lot of the guesswork and helped us get a handle on how to prioritise things. Many years ago I was able to get a vertical garden in an end of season sale, and this is the first year we’re going to be using it. We’ve also been blessed with various containers over the years, and this year we finally rounded out our collection with a series of lightweight plastic planters. As nice as the heavier duty terracotta planters are, we decided that those were prohibitively heavy once full, so compromising on material became important.

This year we have decided to have more plants than usual. We sat down and really took a look at how we eat, what we eat, and what we want to eat in order to decide how to prioritise what we wanted to plant. As nice as it is to dream about a huge garden so full of produce that we wouldn’t have to purchase anymore produce in a grocer, it’s simply not practical given our lifestyle and living space. We have tried to capture this feeling with the vertical garden. It has four herbs we use regularly as well as a series of greens and other small vegetables we like to use in salads. We hope that we will have a mini-wall of ready made salad stuff to use through the spring and summer seasons. Ultimately, it’s an experiment because of how the vertical garden holds moisture.

This is where we planted the peas - the plant we’re most excited for right now. We have had good luck with seeds we can get in our local shops, and while the idea of a trellis is lovely, we like using tomato cages to support the vines. It gives a lot of space for the peas to climb, and since our planter is round we can get more plants around the cage itself. We will get to use them for actual tomato plants later. The big cages are really sturdy too, so we’re hoping to use them for more than just the peas this year.

Since these are the largest planters we own, it makes sense to talk about how we choose the soil we use in our containers since there are so many options out there. We use pre-mixed soil bags for the smaller planters inside our house or for succulents. For the container garden, we choose to make our own soil mixture. We use a combination of garden soil, peat moss, and manure for our baseline. We have a compost pile, and hope to use that next year in lieu of commercial fertilizers. We used about 50% peat moss, 35% garden soil, and 15% manure. As long as we mix it well, we’ve had really good luck with our plants. We’ve never had to completely refill the large planters either. This year, we knew we were adding at least six more medium sized planters, so we bought more soil. I took some of the newer mix and mixed it in with what we already had and it should be just fine.

We have four square planters as well as two larger terracotta planters this year, though they are a bit more experimental for us. We have never grown any type of pepper, and we wanted to try that this year. We have planted a cayenne plant and a serrano chili plant in each of the planters. We’re hoping that by giving each one their own container that they will get fairly large and we will have plenty of peppers. The other container houses the onion we transplanted from a smaller container. It’s an onion that sprouted, and we put it in a pot. It gives the BEST shoots, and we use it in place of green onions often. We also found cowpea seeds for the first time in our local shop. We are particularly excited about this because we really enjoy them even though we don’t often purchase them from the grocer. Cowpeas are a type of very long bean with a more robust flavour than typical green beans most people are familiar with. They vine in a similar fashion to other beans, so we’re using the same tomato cage system we use with the other peas. Wish us luck!

That’s basically it! The vertical garden and square planters have a long season where we live, so we’re hoping to have vegetables from both until fall. The season for the peas and cowpeas is really short and ends just as the heat really starts to set in here. Once their season ends we’ll add several tomato plants and some sweet pepper plants as well as experiment with some tiny watermelons. The plants bring us a lot of joy and contentment. The process of getting everything into the planters is a lot of work, but honestly made a really horrid week a lot easier to cope with. There isn’t a lot to do right now but wait for things to sprout, and that’s really nice. I know that when my day is hard taking time to check on the plants gives me a nice bit of reprieve, and hopefully we’ll get a decent crop of edible things. Even if we don’t though, having somewhere to go and decompress is so valuable. Besides, having the tiny creatures around to check out the plants and our work makes things better too.

I encourage you to find the small things that help you breathe this week.