My garden today

It's a bit overcast today and getting ready to rain. Seemed like a good time to document some progress in my container garden!

This big dish planter was a freebie! I filled it with cheap potting soil that was on sale, and dropped a bunch of rainbow radish seeds on top. Spread a little more dirt over the top of those about 10 days ago. Look at 'em go already! I also have several small flower pots of different types of radishes in the house, planted at the same time, but these ones outdoors are growing much faster. I'll probably move my small pots outside after the rain, it may freeze at night the next few days.

Here's my giant strawberry pot, another freebie! I followed a tip I found to drill holes in a 1 inch pipe and put that down the center of the pot to help distribute water better. We'll see how it works as the plants grow. I filled it up with some super cheap bare root strawberries, the ones on top seem to be perking back up but the lower ones are mostly wilted. I've watered them directly a few times, I think it's just that I planted the ones with bulky roots on top, and small roots on the side where the holes were smaller. I'm hoping they thrive, but if they don't I'll have plenty of edible flower sprouts I can poke in there instead! I have an entire tray of pansies, violas and johnny-jump-ups sprouting.

There's more on the front patio, sprouting indoors and on the other deck, but I'll cover those another day! Fun to watch things grow!

Planting

The gardening bug has me already this year!

I filled up a few pots with mustard greens, carrots and radishes. Those should be done before it's time to plant my main veggies. I filled up my giant strawberry pot too, with some pathetic looking bare root strawberries, but they were cheap! Hopefully they'll perk up a bit and come back to life. I tried a new planting method, using a pipe drilled full of holes in the center of the strawberry pot to get water to spread deeper. I took pictures, but my main computer is still acting up so I can't get them online yet. Soon! If we can't get it fixed soon I'll just save them to disk and transfer them to the laptop that way.

I also had a great find! HUGE pots on sale at Kmart for about $5! They're seriously monsters. I may plant a tree in one, I'd love a dwarf orange or lemon for my patio. I bought 3 of the huge pots, the other two I can't decide what to do with. Carrots, tomatoes, beans, peas? I have some large pots I can use, but nothing else nearly that big! I'm planning to put scarlet runner beans in large pots to climb up the pergola on the deck, with small veggies around the base in the same pot. A large pot of tomatoes, another of bush beans, zucchini in there somewhere - I have big plans this year! Can't wait to get it all going.