Posted on 04/19/2020 5:06:23 AM PDT by blam
Try to up your size to 5 gallon buckets. One tomato or two pepper plants per pot for reference. Potatoes grow well in pots!
Drill holes about 3” from the bottom, all around the edge. If you put your holes on the bottom and it’s sitting on the ground, it will be hard to drain.
Add granular fertilizer to the soil at planting time, but also fertilize every few times when you water because you’re losing some nutrition due to constant watering...especially when it’s the height of summer. :)
Vegetable gardens are fine - a wiser long term move is fruit and nut trees. China’s historic tactic against their own people is starvation - and they’ll use that against us if they can.
Sandhill Preservation is a great source for corn.
Get thee to a garden center and feed store, pronto.
Bet if they asked the neighbor they previously complained about at the HOA because he dared to have a few vegetables growing in his front yard if he could spare some seeds, he’d be happy to share and impart some knowledge on growing them.
Farmers markets will be opening soon. Ask them if they’d sell some seeds.
If people haven’t figured out that some of those germy coughed on veggies in the produce section of their grocery store are seed sources, they aren’t smart enough to water a garden.
Save back some potatoes and let them grow eyes. Cut them up into chunks and plant them.
Purchase a bag of mixed dried beans. Bam, instant seeds. Separate the varieties and plant them along the fence.
Purchase a variety of tomatoes. Eat them but save the seeds. Put the seeds into a cup of water a few days until it turns icky. That takes the outer coating off which helps the seed germinate in the soil.
Buy some sweet and hot peppers and plant the seeds. Save your home grown seeds for next year.
Any onions or garlic going bad? Plant them. Eat the majority but leave some to go to seed for next year’s crop.
Take a bulb of garlic and break apart the cloves. Plant them.
Some lettuce is sold with the roots attached. Sometimes, that will grow. Harvest the bottom leaves and let the young new leaves grow for future harvests. At the end of it’s lifespan, it’ll give you seeds on a stalk for next season.
Save berry seeds. Fruit takes longer than veggies to produce. Berries won’t produce until the second year of growth.
Save the seeds from winter squash and plant them. The summer squash seeds haven’t matured enough. At the end of the season, those plants will give you seeds for next year.
Sorry, cucumber seeds from grocery store cucumbers haven’t matured enough.
Many times, grocery stores will have potted herbs. Plant them outside or on the window sill. Let some mature to grow seeds so you’ll have a continuous supply of herbs.
Don’t throw out produce scraps. Do a search for kitchen garbage garden. Plant them in the kitchen window. They won’t yield full plants but you might get some new growth to add to a salad or whatever. Plant the root section of celery or lettuce or greens. Plant those old chives, spring onions and regular onions. The top part of a carrot might send up some leaves. Don’t throw away the tops that come with your grocery carrots or those that sprout on carrots in your fridge.
Do a search for how to get spores from grocery store mushrooms. Set up a mushroom growing place in a closest or basement.
Look around the neighborhood, empty lots, along the sides of roadways, etc. for foraged edibles. Look in your own backyard for edibles. Our yard has lots of wild onions and sometimes there will be a mouse melon vine. Perhaps yours has purslane or dandelions or some other edibles.
Keep an eye out for fruit or nut trees with limbs over the property line into the public access. Still, it’s nice to ask the land owner for the drops.
Later in the summer, prickly pears, algerita berries, yucca and wild mustang grapes will ripen in the south. Wild blueberries should ripen in the north in a couple months. Be careful of public vs. private land and varmints and poisonous plants.
If you live somewhere with a moderately long growing season, take the suckers from your tomato plants and root them for a second crop for fall. My grandmother did this 50 years ago. ‘Free’ plants.
I was wondering why bird seed has been in such a shortage this year, since March.
I have found that ball onions and celery can be regrown by rooting the bottom of the onion or taking only the outer stalks of celery and rooting the part with some leafy presence. So far I have started four onions re-growing and a beautiful leafy celery plant. The onion discs spout root and top quickly if put atop a shallow water container and left to indoor lighting then transfer to soil and water generously for a week.
’ toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and guns.’
The trifecta of hoarding.
I knew that about celery, I did NOT know that about onions!
Thanks!
Looking like warm, seed-sprouting weather is going to be later than usual for most of the northern, plains and parts of the SE this year.
Frost killed spinach and lettuce seedlings I set out in the garden boxes last week.
“Are there really people who don’t know this already?”
Recall the baby chick craze of a few weeks ago. One woman was posting frantically on a chicken forum that hers were all dying. She didn’t know they have to have a heat lamp and be kept warm.
And....In Wisconsin they're dumping the milk.
I couldn't find any milk at Costco when I went Tuesday.
LOL...Matt Damon.
Great link, with lots of great info.
Thanks!!
We’re using the (empty, washed and drilled drainage holes) protein tubs that we use for our cattle, as planters.
Those make great planters!
I’ve got my biggest citrus trees in those. Also some outdoorsy trees that don’t have a great spot in my yard (too mushy in places) in those on my driveway turnaround.
We’re thinking of trying to overwinter some superhot peppers in one.
Matt Damon. Potatoes and Vicodin. Because he can.
I overwinter superhots in 10-gallon root pouches...murupi amarella, orange spice jalapenos, ice scream scorpions...works like a charm.
The happy thoughts probably helped too.
LOVE all of your suggestions!
“Many times, grocery stores will have potted herbs.”
Our Super Duper Walmart does. You can buy a bigger, healthier potted herb plant in the Produce Section than you can in their Garden Center!
“Purchase a bag of mixed dried beans. Bam, instant seeds. Separate the varieties and plant them along the fence.”
Dollar Tree has 1# bags for a buck!
14 Store Bought Vegetables & Herbs You Can Re-Grow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJuXpiEjdcc
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