Growing things! Part 1

Is there anything more revitalizing that growing stuff? It’s that time of year where my seedlings are started and my flower beds (thanks to an unseasonably warm winter) are laid with new soil and ready for planting. Now am I some kind of green thumb? Nope. But I do love having things that are alive in and around my house, I love home-grown veggies and I do the best I can.

So I’m here to tell you all about how a brown thumb (is that a thing?), lazy girl managed to grow stuff in three parts. Part 1 is what I did last year, which is growing stuff for small living, the heavily traveled or the plane lazy.

Now if you’ve followed along from the beginning you probably know beautiful raised vegetable beds are not in the cards for this girl. So these were my challenges:

1. I needed the flexibility to take my plants with me.
2. They needed to be elevated and protected (we have a very odd amount of wild rabbits).
3. They needed to be easy to maintain.
4. They needed to tolerate some creative watering gaps.
5. And most importantly this venture needed to be budget friendly.

So this is what I came up with, I decided to grow a bunch of tomatoes and a bunch of Kale. Spoiler alert, tomatoes worked great, the Kale was a fail. I went to my local hardware store and took the easy way out, bought some seed starter kits and some organic seeds and read the instructions. Filled seed starts with water inserted seeds to pods placed lid on, hoped for the best. Well I can say they all sprouted as expected and grew quickly. Unfortunately my cat found theses starter kits to be a great launched pad and this was the beginning of the end for my poor kale. I also don’t think it transplanted particularly well and it did not have as much sun as my tomatoes did.

So once my tomatoes out grew their starter pods I did pretty much the opposite of what the internet said to do. I never separated my three plants per starter pod, (to be honest I was sure only one would even survive anyway), planted three of those little pods in a 10″ pot, added some fertilizer and hoped for the best. I placed them in my basement window, not ideal but they would get a few hours of sun a day. Well they flourished, to my surprise. So I moved them outside and instead of buying cages I tied them to my deck. I watered them whenever needed (in the summer heat at least once a day) and would leave them water free most weekends Friday to Sunday. Even though they would look a bit wilt-y as soon as I watered them they came right back.

I ended up with enough tomatoes to make sauce and soup from scratch, plus plenty for salads. When we took vacation in the summer I cut their strings loaded the 6 pots into the back of my mini countryman and drove them to our lake house. They continued to produce and probably could have gotten a second crop had I wanted to travel with them back south after our vacation.

Growing Things! Part 2 – Fall plant withdrawals and how to cope, bucket potatoes