Somebody else’s porch garden.
Even though I haven’t been talking about it yet I have been mulling over in my mind and a bit on paper what we will be growing in our little back porch garden this year.
I’m still a major novice at this whole gardening thing but I’m learning bit by bit.
I will admit that each year about mid growing season I feel like giving up. Things aren’t what I envisioned. Bugs are taking over. Such and such isn’t growing or has caught some horrible disease…
But then we eat what is growing. Or even can it or share with family and friends. Such a rewarding experience!
And then I’m back at it again. Excited to grow things we can actually eat! How fab! So I’ve been plotting and planning.
Our Land (hahahaha)
In case you don’t know we garden. facing north, in 2 raised beds, one or three potato bags (depending upon how I feel), and the rest is on our small back porch. We have a postage stamp for a back yard so that is all the space we have. Our porch is 7 feet 5 feet. I have 6 Garden Patch self watering pots and a few odds and ends pots to hold my massive haul (again laughter).
Garden Patch Containers with sorry looking tomatoes that went on to make a bumper crop.
I’ve never really calculated what we are able to produce but we eat steadily from the porch all summer long and share with my family of our excess. We also serve some large family dinners and freeze onions and tomatoes. Pretty good eh? But I mean to do more. As much as I can. Some of the standbys, or regular items we grow are onions, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, peas, cucumbers, and swiss chard. The rest is iffy, It might grow it might not.
One of the self watering pots is permanently taken up by June bearing strawberries I’ve had since 1994. About 3 years before I got married. I keep them going in case we buy a house where I can actually put them in the ground. That means they’ve been surviving in a pot for almost 20 years. I plant the new runners back in the pot and fertilize them each year. They still produce surprisingly and last year was the best yet.
The Plant List
So this year here is the list….
- Onions (red of course)
- Potatoes
- Peas
- Beans
- Swiss Chard
- Cucumbers
- Zucchini
- Tomatoes
- Peppers (still on the maybe shelf)
- Artichokes (Sweet Peanut is in charge of this completely and I hesitate to even blog about it. But she could surprise me).
I’ll be ordering seeds from Territorial Seed Co. and *** for the onions. This year I’m going back to the fertilizer we used the first year we moved in here and started this whole thing. The fertilizer that came with the garden patch pots we still use. That year our tomatoes were out of sight and so far I haven’t had as good yield with other fertilizers. They have an organic version now so I’m mulling over that too. I picked up Apartment Gardening in the Healthy Ebook Sale last year so I’ll be referring to that along with my copies of 1,001 Gardening Secrets and Jerry Baker’s Backyard Problem Solver.
So that is the back porch gardening plan for the Quinns for 2013.
Woo hoo! Aren’t you excited? I am!
Linked up with Help for the Hopeful Gardener
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