Well, they say its better late than never! I was finally able to get a few moments to plant our fruits and vegetables in the feeding troughs. I took the little ladies to the greenhouse last weekend, and because we are starting later than usual, we decided to purchase some plants that were well on their way, instead of starting with seeds.
Just to be clear, I am the gal at the greenhouse that is asking several questions to the person that works there…I am definitely NOT an expert in this arena. I just love the process of picking the plants and working to put them in dirt to see what will happen next. Perhaps this is an experiment just for myself to see if anything will come of it!
So back to our gardening project, we brought our plants home on Saturday, and then experienced so much rain for the next 48 hours, I thought they all might float away! All that being said, last night was the night, and I gave it go.
The first thing the gardener recommended is that I mix a bag of fresh top soil and a bag of organic manure compost mixture to give a fresh layer to our containers.
Instead of starting from scratch, I brushed away some of the dirt to show where the height in the container came from. I used two 5 gallon pails that I tuned upside down in the galvanized trough last year. I filled the rest of the container with the topsoil/compost mixture last year (It took 3 bags of each). Our fresh layer this year required only one bag of each. This top layer above the orange buckets is about 12″ deep so the roots of the plants have enough dirt to grow into to stabilize.
Then I laid out what we were planting. We are going to try one of these “bucket” raspberry plants. (I’m a little uncertain how this one is going to go!) I also took eight strawberry plants and planted them around the raspberries about 6″ apart.
In our other container, I planted vegetables. We have some leeks on the perimeter, pea pods in the center, and two larger tomato plants on the end. Again, this is a first for us with the leeks, we will see how they do!
Finally, I watered them both with a mist spray from the hose. Because they were not planted for several days, I made sure the soil was definitely damp. I then inserted two old wine bottles, that I filled with water, to create a constant “drip” of water into the soil around the tomatoes and raspberries, because they were the larger plants.
This process truly took about twenty minutes for me to plant these two troughs. While I am not 100% sure of the outcome, I am grateful for the process of trying. We will give it a go, and I will report back as to the progress of the veggies popping up! I’ll be sure to post the updates on our Instagram page #georgiapepperberry.
Make it a great day!
Kellie
