***Jeff & Em**

daisygirl17

tell e about your container garden...I'm intrigued and depending on what it all involves, might start one too

Jeff & Em

I'm so excited!

I'm going to try growing green beans, peas, hot cherry peppers, jalapenos, and tomatoes on our lower deck.  : )  I'm going to grow them all from seed, so we went to Lowe's and bought a shop light kit that holds 4' fluorescent bulbs.  I think it cost $10.  Then we bought two bulbs to put in it; you need to have one cool bulb and one warm bulb (or a plant bulb).  It works the same as an official grow-light setup, but it's a lot cheaper. 

We also bought a Jiffy 7 greenhouse; it's a plastic tray that comes with a plastic lid and has little peat packets that expand when they get wet.  Sometime in February I'll plant my tomatoes and peppers (oh!  and gerbera daisies and chives for my window boxes); the peas and green beans can be started off just fine.  When they're big enough they'll get transplanted in to the big pots. 

The last frost around here is usually in early April, and the "safe" date to have plants outside is the end of April.  So, I'm planning on putting my plants outside to harden them off in mid-April.  That just means that I'll stick them outside for an hour on a nice day, and then bring them in.  Then stick them outside for 2 hours the next day, and then bring them in.  And work my way up for about a week or so.  I need to ask my dad about transplanting them; I don't know if I do that before or after hardening them off.

The biggest issue is having containers that are large enough for the plants to grow in and not spending a million dollars getting containers.  So, I've hit up freecycle and craigslist to see if people have large ones.  I've had some success, but IKEA also has some really large terra cotta pots for about $6 that I can use as my backup plan. 

Container gardens also dry out really fast, so you have to be willing to water them and fertilize (because you water them so much you wash away all of the good stuff plants need).  I still need to research fertilizers.

I pretty much just googled the heck out of container gardening and found sites that agreed pretty close with each other.  I also checked out the book "The Bountiful Container" from the library which gives specific varieties of veggies to try that tend to be smaller and more compact.  

This site was probably my favorite:

http://www.extension.iastate.edu/Publications/PM870B.pdf

SDgirl22

Totally chiming in with my fellow PDX container gardeners!

Em-We ending up using this fertilizer last year per the recommendation of our local nursery...thought you might be interested (oh, and our dog LOVED the put her nose in the pots and try to eat the soil when we mixed it in...it was hard to keep her out of there!)

Happy Frog Organic Fertilizer

Alisha_A

Love the detailed plan, thank you! I honestly hadn't really thought out the seed part, and also hope to use mostly seeds. I sort of envisioned tossing them on the ground and magically I'd have plants. Maybe not.

Jeff & Em

Thanks for the fertilizer rec!  I'll check it out and be sure to keep Nandi away from it.

Alisha you're funny!  : )  You can technically buy seedlings for things like tomatoes at greenhouses and hardware stores, but you're pretty limited in varieties.  I don't think peas transplant well, which is why they get started outside.  And greenbeans are hard to screw up, I think.