Tuesday, April 12, 2011

How does your garden grow? And a confession.

My people decide to do some potted gardening. Since they are renting their house, they're not allowed to dig up the yard and plant a garden. Quite frankly, Fod and I could have a "garden" dug up in the yard in about 10 seconds, but my people voted against that. In any case, they decided to try their hand at planting a few peppers and tomatoes in pots and see how these little guys like the California weather. Our area gets rather cool at night, so we'll see.

We got the basics: Plants, pots, soil, and water.


Here's where the confession comes in.

While the actual planting of these goodies was not an impulse buy (we had already discussed it, budgeted for it, and decided to try it), the actual purchase of our supplies was an impulse buy. We hadn't done any research on growing in pots, but we were out running errands and were already in the store, so it seemed like a good idea to go ahead and buy the items and make an educated guess until we could get home and do a little internet searching. I'm sure the folks at the store could have helped us, but I'm also rather sure they'd be trying to up-sell as well. Can't blame them. So, for the last few weeks, our plants have been a little crowded--4 tomato plants in one pot and 4 pepper plants in the other.

You'll be pleased to know that the plants have since been split up to 2 peppers in a pot and each tomato plant is in its own pot (which, per the internet, is how it's supposed to be....and the internet would lie to us, right?).

I'll be posting pictures of our progress during this summer season. Hopefully this yields us lots of fresh, yummy, tomatoes and peppers and helps save us some dough at the grocery store.

For now, I've sniffed the plants lots and have seen no evidence of tomatoes or peppers, so I'm not convinced, but my people claim it'll work.

Any great tips for first-time growers?

Linked to Frugal Gardening 101 at Amy's Finer Things, Getting Freedom, and Smockity Frocks.

3 comments:

  1. tomatoes LOVE humidity (which we obviously don't have) so you just have to keep them plenty watered. and you'll probably need some supports for them at some point. my mom grew peppers too, but i don't remember much about caring for them. our tomatoes in MD were a total flop, so hopefully you'll have better success haha

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  2. Peppers and tomatoes both do great in planters. You will just have to stay on top of watering them, and will possibly have to add some fertilizer to your tomatoes.

    Thank you for linking up to Frugal Gardening 101! Do you mind including a link back to the original post? :)

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  3. Absolutely, thanks! I am still learning blogging etiquette :)

    I have been tossing around the idea of fertilizing more (the soil I got has fertilizer in it), but I may do some separate fertilizing if they need it.

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