Growing

You should see my mom's garden. It's incredible -a huge "kitchen garden", filled with enough veggies that my parents can freeze enough to feed them most of the year. Every summer it seems to grow in size, and I'm in awe of my parents' ability to maintain and harvest it.

I live in an apartment, so my dreams of my own veggie garden aren't so attainable. This year though, we decided that we didn't care anymore that we don't really have our own "outdoor" space, and made a container garden anyways! Its been so wonderful to finally be growing our own herbs, and we can't wait to see what we can get in terms of tomatoes.

With the late spring, we didn't really get things started until the middle of June- beginning of July. Here's what it looked like on July 4th. I wanted to try the "tippy pot" idea that's been all over pinterest, but I didn't have the terra cotta pots to do it. I tried it with black plastic pots, and I'm ok with, but not thrilled with, the result. It looks a little blah in black, but its a fun way to go vertical and take up less space. We visited my parents at the end of June and came back with some leftovers that didn't fit in my parent's garden. I didn't want to waste too much, so I kind of crammed things in -I'm hoping to replant some things so that they make more aesthetic sense.  In the base of the tower are onions, the second pot has hot peppers, the third has marigolds, coleus, and alyssum. The top has starts of perennial onions, but I think I need to move something more showy there until they actually grow tall enough to be visible. Down the line we've got a pot of leftovers crammed together (need to get around to repotting!), more onions, three tomatoes, regular mint, chocolate mint, basil, oregano and a strawberry. We also tried spinach in window boxes, but it didn't do so well. I'm replanting those boxes with basil -I can't ever get enough basil! :)

Here's where I'm at now, the mints are being mints and going crazy, the strawberry is sending out runners, I'm harvesting lots of basil, and some of the tomatoes are just about to pop. I just found some cheap large pots at ReStore (such a cool place!) yesterday, and finally got around to buying more soil, so I'm ready to head out into the beautiful sunshine and work on repotting some things. On the list are to move the flowers from the "left-overs" pot on the ground to the top tier of the tower and to split out the tomatoes that are languishing in the left-overs pot. I'll be adding some of the miracle worm poo from Meredith to the soil to help make healthy happy plants!