and thrilled so far. "So far" isn't much, but radishes were up in six days and bush beans in eight, in spite of three nights of freezing temps a few days after the seeds were planted. I live in northern Colorado, a gardener's heaven and hell. A week ago, we shivered through night lows around 30 and today sweat through low 90s. If veggies could talk, they'd say, "Huh? You expect me to grow in *this* climate?"
Do others who garden in containers feel more of an attachment to their veggies if they're in containers instead of the ground? It's a little like caging a pet instead of letting it run free in a fenced yard.
Thanks to the wonderful informaton available in DG, I'm also trying tomatoes in large plastic pots. One is a Fourth of July, not listed anywhere as a tomato with a taste to die for, but it supposedly is a 45-dayer. Anything will beat those red rocks supermarkets sell as tomatoes.
New to container veggies ...
Shendoh: I do a lot of container gardening here in southcentral Alaska. I even grow my potatoes in halved whiskey barrels. I grow my broccoli, cauliflower, and kale in raised beds, but most else is container fare. I can't say whether I feel "closer" to my container veggies, since most all of them are in containers. We hold all our veggies dear in Seward, since the yields are small. You can offer someone a homegrown carrot, and you'd think you'd offered them the crown jewels!
<< We hold all our veggies dear in Seward, since the yields are small. You can offer someone a homegrown carrot, and you'd think you'd offered them the crown jewels! >>
:) I can understand that. Yields here must be higher than in Alaska, but they're still iffy (cold when it shouldn't be cold, wind, drought, the Southwest Monsoon that can dump a year's average moisture in days), so we prize what we get. Nothing, even twice-weekly farmers' market produce, can beat what we've grown and picked ourselves, then cooked while still warm off the plants. My very favorite meal is the first "pick" of beans -- green and wax plus Italian if we're lucky -- cooked together with a generous dash of summer savory instead of the usual bacon for flavor. That meal is a plate full of beans, period.
I sure miss growing beans. We used to grow snap beans back in Indiana when I was a kid. My mother would cook them with a ham bone and some onion. She served it with corn bread and fresh tomatoes from the garden. I can recall many meals that revolved around the fresh produce.
We can grow tomatoes and peppers in the greenhouse, but not outdoors. I have marginal success with zucchini, but winter squash doesn't work. Corn would be a greenhouse item, if you had a 50 foot greenhouse. We do very well with the cole veggies like cabbage, kale, cauliflower, and broccoli... the things that like cool weather and soil. Brussels sprouts are marginal, only producing developed sprouts in the longer summers.