Small Garden, Big Harvest

First, a confession. I have two gardens. I have my small porch garden where everything is grown in containers and I also have a 10ft x 10ft plot in my town's community garden. I did reference my community garden plot in this post about the garden as my sandbox. And I do share lots of pictures from my garden plot outside of this blog.

But this blog is mainly focused on the porch garden and this post in particular is exclusively from the porch.

Harvest time is in full swing now, which is really the most fun part about porch gardening. Almost every day I can walk out my front door and pick something for dinner.

I love the colors of these "sweet pickle" peppers.

These huge Italian peppers are called "The Godfather". The name definitely influenced my purchase of these seeds. It was an offer I couldn't refuse.

"Black Beauty" eggplant is doing very well in the Earthbox.

Here's a view of part of the porch garden from 8/15/13. Eggplant and peppers in the front row, tomatoes in the back by the fence. More peppers, herbs and cucumbers hiding off camera.

Porch garden harvest from 8/17/13. Peppers, eggplant, pink tomatoes and black cherry tomatoes (my favorite.) I made a nice Italian dinner out of this.

And another porch garden harvest from a week later, 8/24/13. Not bad for just a couple of pots on the front porch. I think I'll cook up some eggplant and roasted sweet peppers for lunch!

Back in Time/ Tomato Adoption Agency

Okay, I meant to do this post almost 2 months ago. So I'm gonna jump in my DeLorean, flip the time circuits on, and set my destination for June 1st, 2013 (i.e. sort the garden pics on my computer by date until I find the right ones. Sometimes I try too hard to make a blog about plants seem exciting.)

Anyway, this brings us to tomato adoption. Every year I grow (way too many) tomato plants from seed. Happily, I know several other gardeners who are willing to adopt a few. So back in June I loaded up the seedlings and delivered them to their new homes in the porch gardens of my family and friends. This year, I delivered tomato plants to five other gardens. Here are photos of a couple of them from back in June and July.

Tomato plants in the car for delivery.

Loving their new home in my mom's porch garden.

Glad to contribute to my sister's first garden this year! I think she's getting a green thumb!

Hooray for more porch gardens!

Acting like a kid

A thought struck me the other day while I was out in my garden. This is like playing outside.

I was always a kid with dirty hands, skinned knees and rocks in my pockets all summer. I loved being outside. But when you're a kid you don't need an excuse to play outside. You don't need a purpose or a task. You just go out and run around, play with bugs, pick dandelions, make helicopters out of maple seeds, do whatever you want without thinking about what time it is or what anyone thinks.

As an adult, (okay, that title is debatable) I might feel a little odd just poking around outside doing nothing in particular. So I think gardening bridges that gap. It lets me play around and explore nature-y stuff while still seemingly doing an "adult-like" productive thing.

Sometimes, while picking pea pods or watching the bees buzz in and out of the tomato blossoms, I still forget what time it is and don't care whether anyone is watching.

This is my sandbox.

But instead of making mudpies I'm growing vegetables. And sometimes it's good to get outside and get your hands dirty.

Why you should start an herb garden

Everybody wants to grow tomatoes. But there's nothing wrong with going smaller with your porch garden. Here are some reasons to grow an herb garden.

1) It's easy.
If you've never gardened before, a small pot of herbs is an easy, low-cost way to try it out. Most herbs are pretty low-maintenance and don't take up much space. Just buy a couple of your favorite herb plants at your local garden center or farmer's market and plant them in potting mix in an 8-10 inch pot (or whatever size is recommended for that particular type.)

2) Aroma therapy.
Just watering the plants can bring out the scent. My fave is rosemary.

3) Your food will taste better.
Seriously. Fresh herbs make everything taste better. They're way better than dried or store-bought.

4) It's cheaper to grow your own.
Buying a plant or seeds costs about the same as or less than buying a package of herbs at the store. You'll get a lot more from a plant that you can grow all season and you can cut only what you need when you need it, so it'll be pretty growing in a pot instead of turning brown in your fridge.

5) Impress your friends.
You can brag to all your hippie/hipster/tree-huggin'/foodie dinner guests that you are serving them locally grown herbs. This weekend we had chopped peaches with cinnamon and locally grown basil at my house. The basil was grown (starting from seed) less than 6 feet from where it was eventually eaten. Nice! Can't get much more local than your own front porch!

This post comes with inspiration from Colleen, who has a wonderful herb garden and knows how to use it! We were swapping herbs this week and she pointed out how cost-efficient growing your own herb garden is. Thanks Colleen!

The Great Outdoors

The seedlings are all now officially out of the house and on the porch! And on the patio! And on the porches and patios of my family and friends!
(I gave away about 10 seedlings this year, but more on that in another post.)

I was a little slow getting the seedlings hardened off this year, partly because of the weather and partly because of my insistence on over-scheduling myself. But they all seem pretty acclimated now, and no sign of transplant shock. (Here's a good description of the hardening off process.)

So here are the first photos of the 2013 porch garden:

Sweet pepper, parsley, and basil transplants,
plus rosemary from the farmer's market.

Sweet pepper

Sweet pepper

Eggplant

Red bell peppers and eggplant

Summer squash (direct-seeded)

Basil

Black cherry and Early wonder tomatoes

Picklebush cucumber (direct-seeded)

Another rescue mission

It's about 3 weeks past the average last frost date here and it hit 88 degrees this week, yet the weather forecast for tonight predicts temperatures in the 30's and patchy frost. So I rushed home after the gym tonight to rescue my plants from rapidly falling temperatures. (I've been in rescue mode already this week with the baby bird incident on Sunday.)

Here's one cool thing about container gardening: you can move the plants! So instead of eating dinner when I got home, I hauled a bunch of large, heavy, waterlogged (did I mention it was raining?) containers of plants into the garage. Bonus workout!

So I have peppers, eggplant and herbs camping out in the garage tonight. Good thing I hadn't planted the tomatoes outside yet!

Plants grow faster than I can write...

So here's a photo dump of the last few weeks:

Seedlings 4/24/13


Repotting pepper plants 5/7/13


Peppers, tomatoes and basil under the lights 5/18/13


Here's a link to the grow light building plans I used:
Cornell gardening resources Low-Cost Grow-Light Frame Plans

Gardening isn't just plants

Every year since I started gardening it seems I have come across something I've never seen before.

One year I had this pretty yellow and black butterfly hanging around my mums.


Another time I discovered that these fuzzy caterpillars love basil.

And these striped caterpillars really love parsley.

Found this little dude on my bell pepper plant. Possibly a katydid?

I've also found frogs, chipmunks, leaf cutter bees, cucumber beetles, hornworms (ick) and lots of other bugs.

So today after potting basil and parsley seedlings out on the porch, I walked around the side of my building to put my gardening stuff away in my garage and a weird movement on the ground caught my eye. At first I thought it was a small lizard wriggling around in the wood chips, which would have been in odd thing to find in this area. I looked closer and saw it was a baby bird, pink and scaly with its eyes still closed. The poor thing seemed to be in distress and was struggling to crawl around with its spindly legs and stubby little featherless wings. I didn't see a nest or a parent bird around, and had no idea how to rescue a baby bird, so I called the humane society. They advised me to place the bird on a towel-nest in a small box and they would come out to pick it up. Within 15 minutes this little guy was on his way to the Bird Center of Washtenaw County. I hope he survives!



I never would have seen him if I hadn't been out working on my plants.


Bird Center of Washtenaw County
Humane Society of Huron Valley

Tomatoes: the gateway vegetable (or fruit)

The porch garden started with a single tomato plant, bought at Meijer and planted in a big plastic pot on my porch. I live in a condo, so planting in the ground isn't an option here, but I have a big porch that gets lots of sun. This first tomato plant was nothing spectacular, and maybe only yielded about 10 medium-sized tomatoes for the season, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I just watered it and hoped for the best. The next year I bought a cherry tomato seedling and planted it in an Earthbox that my mother-in-law gave me, and this happened:



This was the craziest tomato plant I had ever seen! Even though I still really had no idea what I was doing and couldn't say for sure why this plant was so successful, I was hooked on vegetable gardening. I saved seeds from that plant (more on seed-saving later) and bought seeds for more tomatoes, bell peppers, basil, parsley and snap peas. I read up on seed starting and started my own seeds for the first time in the spring.



The garden filled my whole porch and I started to realize that you can really grow a lot of food with no land at all.

Now I've got about 16+ containers on my porch and patio and have grown eggplant, several varieties of tomatoes, bell peppers, sweet peppers, peas, beans, cucumbers, basil, parsley, rosemary, and oregano.

I still wouldn't consider myself an expert, but I learn a little every year and that's a huge part of why I like doing it.


Mother nature is the best teacher, and there's a lot of trial and error in gardening. But, here are a few books that have also been helpful to me in the learning process:

The Gardens for All Book of Tomatoes (I learned almost everything I know about seed starting and growing tomatoes from this book. It's old-school, but gardening isn't new, so why not learn from the past?)

The Gardens for All Book of Eggplant, Okra & Peppers (Some of the same info as their tomato book, but a good resource for growing peppers or eggplant. I haven't tried okra yet.)

McGee & Stuckey's Bountiful Container: Create Container Gardens of Vegetables, Herbs, Fruits, and Edible Flowers (The best book on container gardening that I've found. It has pretty much everything you need to know, including which types of plants grow well in containers.)

The Week-by-Week Vegetable Gardener's Handbook: Make the Most of Your Growing Season (This one is not geared specifically toward container gardening, actually most of it is not, but I love the way it's organized by week.)



Happy gardening!