This is my sad bucket garden right now. Most of these buckets are raspberries and blackberries that I think were killed by the very cold and long winter. I also bought another raspberry plant to replace those. The shelf thing is part of a cheap three tier greenhouse. I'm using pieces of it (like the wire shelves) to protect my little asparagus sprouts from the squirrels. They don't eat the sprouts. They just dig through the soil and uproot everything. Most of my buckets I have little rocks in to deter the squirrels. But I couldn't do that with the asparagus seeds sprouting.
This is the argenteuil or French asparagus. They came up very well. I think every seed may have sprouted.
This is the Mary Washington. So far only three of these have sprouted. (Might be hard to see them. It was drizzling outside so I had to take the pic quickly. I circled the two bigger ones in red to help.) The squirrels dug through both of these pots before I erected my defenses. But I'm afraid they might have pushed too much soil over the seeds. I do have some more seeds. So if these are the only ones that sprout then I can always plant some more. The Mary Washingtons are also the more common of these two varieties so I could probably get some crowns to plant when we get our property. You can also click on the pics for a bigger image.
Here are my two grapevines. The first is a concord grape and the other is a variety called Reliance seedless. The potted plants are all around the concord one because when I planted it, a squirrel dug through the freshly disturbed soil and completely uprooted it. (Can you see a theme forming here?) There are a couple of leaves that don't look so good. That's because when the stupid squirrel uprooted it, it also broke that branch. Not a big deal since it's not the main branch. But annoying just the same. That branch is still mostly attached to the plant and is still alive. So after I get done with this post, I'm going to get some cling wrap and some soil and see if I can get that damaged branch to root. The other plants around the concord grape are a volunteer russian kale and a tophat bluberry plant that didn't make it through the winter (top) and a yellow, orange spotted canna and an empty terra cotta pot (bottom).
Things I've got growing indoors are...... My tea herbs. Zebra haworthia (not an herb and not for tea but still in the pic), chamomile that didn't make it, stevia, orange mint, lemon balm, rosemary, lemon verbena (my favorite, smells so good) and a pak choi. The tall thing growing with the rosemary is lambs quarters I think. A weed to most people but you can eat the leaves. A lot of these look kind of ratty because they got kind of leggy and I hadn't trimmed them because I was waiting until we moved. But the other day I broke down and trimmed the orange mint and the lemon balm. I've got the cuttings in a covered pot to try to get them to root. I'll probably do the same thing to the stevia today.
If you follow my youtube channel then you would have seen the video of these pak choi sprouting. They haven't grown much but I've made some rabbit manure tea that I'll be feeding them today. Hopefully that will encourage lots of leaf growth.
But a weird thing that's happened to one of them is that it's starting to bolt. These plants aren't very big or very old so shouldn't be doing this. The only thing I can figure is that it's getting hotter outside and subsequently hotter in the house and I haven't really bothered to turn down the a/c much. Guess that will have to change. Only trouble with that is that my chair sits right next to the vent and I get cold really fast. Guess I'll have to move my chair. But I really like sitting right next to the big window. Oh well. I've also been a bit absent minded with watering (with everything else on my mind right now) so I'm sure that's part of the problem too.
I've also got my spider plants hanging above my herbs. As you can see, they're very happy in a bright window with no extra lighting. They're also supposed to be good with keeping the air in the house a little cleaner. Not sure if that's true, but I still like them.
And last but not least, these are the 30 gallon containers where I'm packing our stuff. I'll be using these for gardening once we get moved. I'll be using a smaller version of these for my aquaponics prototype and then graduating up to this size if all goes well.
Anyway, that's it for now. As always, feel free to post any questions or comments either here or on my google plus page.
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