Given the growing (haha) popularity of vegetable gardening over the last several years, which has gone into overdrive during the pandemic, more and more people are looking for innovative ways to grow in all kinds of spaces. Container vegetable gardening can be as simple as popping a tomato into a bucket, but there are lots … Continue reading Contain Yourself: Vegetable gardening in containers and small spaces
I attempted to clean up our little home greenhouse over the holiday break. There’s no good place to recycle pots around here, and I hate throwing them away…so I suffer from container build-up. Figured I’d sort through the haphazard pile in the corner of the greenhouse, wash and re-stack the useable ones, and finally ditch … Continue reading Re-using containers? A cautionary tale.
I’m just starting to think about getting my containers planted for the summer and happened to get an email on the topic from a blog reader. John was frustrated with a local columnist’s advice on using gravel in the bottom of the containers for drainage. When challenged, the columnist refuted John’s accurate comments with “logical … Continue reading Container planting: intuition vs. reality
A few days ago I got a question from Cynthia about “potting up.” For those of you for whom this is an unknown phrase (and no, it’s not a euphemism for a certain herbal activity), it refers to the practice of moving plants into ever larger containers. She was wondering if there was any “real … Continue reading Plant containers – does size really matter?
I enjoyed Jeff’s post on the RootTrapper and thought I’d share another interesting and [relatively] new development in the world of greenhouse growing containers. Take a tube full of growing media, wrap a paper sleeve around it, and voila – the Ellepot! It’s bottomless, root permeable, and degradable. Each Ellepot sits in its own cell … Continue reading Building a Better Container, Part Deux: The Ellepot
As most of you know, roots circling around a container isn’t considered a good thing. And so people try various things to control circling roots. One of the more creative horticultural minds out there, Carl Whitcomb, a guy why basically got sick of academia and went into private industry (and, as far as I can tell, … Continue reading Building a Better Container
The movie “Field of Dreams” is a family favorite – we love how baseball and the supernatural are interwoven to create a great story. If you haven’t seen the movie, you should – and for those of you that have, you know why it was important for Ray to build the baseball field. Like the … Continue reading Mycorrhizae: “If you build it, they will come”
Last month in my blog My Soil Is Crap Part I, I tried to dispel the myth that you can diagnose soil problems by just looking at your soil. While the color of a soil does impart some diagnostic qualities, most soils are not easily analyzed without a soils test. A complete soils test will … Continue reading My Soil Is Crap, Part II
Most experienced gardeners will tell you what should be started indoors (or purchased) as transplants and what should be direct sown into the garden, but this can often be confusing for new gardeners. Add to the confusion the fact that some plants have a gray area when it comes to what is best, sometimes it … Continue reading To (direct) sow, or not to sow, that is the question: whether ’tis nobler in the garden to transplant
In this post I explore the use of SUPERthrive in hydroponics and whether there was a benefit in my test case.
