The vegetable garden is moving along! Just waiting for the weather to be nice enough to get the seedlings into the ground. It’s still just a bit cool at night for the tomatoes and bell peppers.
While we are building another raised bed this year, I’m short on available planting beds, so I am trying something new. I am using food-grade 5-gallon buckets to grow carrots and sweet potatoes in this year. I’ve seen some good YouTube videos on growing this way. A nice quick, low cost alternative. I drilled 6 half-inch holes in the bottom of each bucket for drainage and filled with some good garden soil that I have been amending over the years. We’ll see how that works out. I couldn’t believe now nice this soil was when I started filling the buckets. Isn’t it funny how something like soil quality can make you feel so good? You know you’re a gardener when…
Got the sweet potato starts coming along.
Other than that, I got carrots and swiss chard seeded over the weekend, and have some kale coming up.
Also, I picked up a banana pepper plant at a big box store. I’ve not grown those before. The man puts them on everything so it made sense to start growing our own.
I am planning to do the tomatoes in 5-gallon buckets and hoping to get some tomato cages made up soon out of steel mesh, the heavy duty kind that you buy in a large roll. They will sit nicely over the buckets. A good friend of ours lent us some cages made of this a few years ago and they beat the heck out of the premade tomato cages we had found at other places (see the bucket photo above, those are the store bought “tomato cages” I am referring to). I found that those smaller ones are adequate for peppers. The homemade ones were taller, sturdier, all around better. Great support for the tomato plants and great protection from the deer.
What are you guys growing this year? What types of deer/rabbit resistance do you use? Any that you swear by?
4 Comments
🙂
It’s super-cool here at night! Too cold!
Agreed! I’ll take hot over cold almost anytime 🙂
I haven’t grown anything in my garden for the last few years. My mom and dad live nearby and always have plenty of produce to share from their garden. I keep thinking I am going to plant something and then get busy and it doesn’t happen. Good luck with what you are growing. Oh, one of my home remedies that seemed to work when I did have a garden was to soak string in a concoction of vinegar, water, hot sauce, and garlic and then string it around the planting area. Seemed to keep a lot of things at bay, but you have to re-soak it every once in a while, esp. after a lot of rain.
Great tip – haven’t heard of that one, but i can see how it would work. Thanks!