Summer Bounty Begins + Container Gardening

Hello again. Glad you could take time to look me up. The summer bounty has begun! Right now we're harvesting beets, cucumbers, summer squash, snap peas, green beans, and raspberries regularly.  In addition, we've had over night rain for the past three nights which has reduced the need to spend a lot of time watering the garden. I'm so thankful. It's like having a morning off from work!

                                                           Today's haul

And since I mentioned watering, the main garden here at home and in the county park retain rain water well simply by virtue of their size and depth. On the other hand, some of the baskets and containers here at the home garden need to be watered daily due to their lack of depth and breadth. The needs of those plants for water and the faster evaporation rate demand more attention. 

The six containers pictured above from left to right are eggplant, delicata squash, echinacea, cherry tomato, yellow squash, and fennel (which can't be seen). All of the containers are approximately the same "volume" as a 5 gallon bucket. We have a total of 21 containers. Those not shown here are home to irises, strawberries, bee balm, cherry tomatoes, and more echinacea. If you're gardening in these types of containers, you need to be aware that they need water frequently.

 If you plan on going on a vacation for more than 2  days, you really need to get a "plant sitter" who can stop by daily and check your plants for water needs. You'd be amazed at the number of questions I've seen from gardeners who wonder what to do when they get back from vacation to find the plants they nurtured to now be material for the compost heap.....they usually start with something like "I really watered my container plants well before I left..."

The flowering baskets need to be watered regularly as well. Many, like the wall baskets in the picture above seem to be okay on an every other day schedule, unless the temperatures get extremely high. The flowering baskets, like the one shown below, due to it's density of plants, needs to be watered every day, sometimes even when it showers overnight. If the rain is not heavy, the plant leaves simply let the water slide over onto the deck below.

All of our herbs are in  containers of some sort - large flower pots or window boxes. Herb containers save space in the garden and also keep the herbs from spreading and becoming a nuisance. In my June 15 post regarding the herb plants we are growing, I neglected to mention two. They are fennel shown below (with water bottle collars to keep the snails from getting to the tender leaves)

and catnip (picture below) which any cat owner should grow just to save the expense of buying it. Cats love catnip fresh or dried. You can dry the catnip you grow using a microwave dryer kit.

I also mentioned mint spreading by means of runners. Our mint plant just developed a runner. If it were in a garden, each one of the leaf sprigs on the runner pictured below would become a mint plant. Oregano travels in pretty much the same way.

Thanks again for taking a look. Got questions? Use the "comments" section below.  I hope to see you again next week.