Adventures in Mama-Land

This planter makes me SO happy!!!  I potted it up back in May when I did the petunias, and believe me, it didn’t look like much back then.  This was basically a “leftovers” pot:  two spare lobelia plugs I’d grown from seed, a neglected indoor spider plant, and a sprig of coleus that I found snapped off a hanging planter at a Home Depot store (I didn’t do anything special, just stuck it in the soil and kept it watered). It might not look like one of those huge, overflowing-with-blooms planters you buy at a garden store, but all the plants inside mean something to me, and they’re all healthy and doing great.  What more could I ask for? Oh.  I just realized I lied.  Because this planter was VERY cheap – almost so cheap as to be free.  Two lobelia seeds ?  A billionth of a penny.  A spider plant we got free at the Ex many years ago.  And a coleus sprig that would have been swept up and trashed in a big-box store.  But I lied b...

I promised in the first part that I would post pics of the three hanging things I had forgotten.  And then, today, Gayla Trail of You Grow Girl had a post all about growing sweet potatoes !  She mentions that the leaves are edible, something that’s well-known in Africa and not-at-all-known here.  So even if we don’t have a long enough season to get actual tubers, at the end of the season we can eat the plant rather than throwing it away! So here’s my own homegrown sweet potato, finally growing vigourously.  Lovely foliage!  But, inspired by Gayla , I really, really want to try them in grow bags next year! Click here to see this potato when it first started growing roots, back in May .  It was very slow to start this year – after many many weeks of almost no progress – perhaps because the house was so cold.  I separated off about three slips and planted them separately in a hanging planter.  For more info on starting sweet potatoes, have a l...

It’s July, and welcome once again to Things That Hang! Here, we have a tomato happily growing in my Vesey’s Revolutionary Planter (year 2 in my garden).  Running out of room for this plant, actually; it’s hanging pretty low and kind of encroaching on one of my other tomato plants. Experimental hanging zucchini and tomato – the tomato is hanging from the bottom of a regular (read: FREE) hanging plastic planter that I found at the curb last year.  It’s a good-sized pot with a single drainage hole in the centre.  That’s where I stuck the tomato in:  forget those fancy upside-down gadgets and just get yourself a POT with a HOLE in it.    Easy, cheap! When I hung it up on the trellis, however, I realized the pot had cracked on the bottom over the winter (drat), so I’ll need to chuck it after this season, but meanwhile, it’s holding in the soil and tomato and doing just fine, as is the zuke, which has flowers but no actual zucchinis so far.  I...

Well, in June I had almost twice the visitors as I did last year (clarification: in June of last year; I'm not doing THAT well!), and some of you even apparently came back to the site once or twice. So, in your honour, and because I’m putting off making supper while I sit down and have a break, I will answer a few recent Google queries. (here are links to my two previous search-engine roundups: Roundup #1 , (mini)Roundup #2 , and Roundup #3 ) What are you looking for??? Recent queries where people actually found their answers at my site! Lots of you want to know about growing vegetables in reusable canvas grocery bags ! Good for you, but they don’t have to be canvas… I suspect canvas wouldn’t work as well as a synthetic fabric, such as these grocery bags are made of. In fact, I’m loading up this bag again later on today to hang it with a tomato. How about a tomato rose sauce ??? I’ve got one of those , and it’s very, very easy! As always, I do have a post a...

  Here are what’s left of my six hanging side-door “bulletproof” planters, planted in June with Creeping Jenny and Phalaris Ribbon Grass. As I suspected back then, the plants in these six (only 3 seen here) Ikea hanging planters admirably survived the extremes of drought and drowning that I could have predicted based on the planters’ small size and poor drainage. In my opinion, they looked pretty good, including serving nicely as living sukkah decorations . So my two choices, now that the end of the season has arrived, were a) leave them to die, or b) get them in the ground and see if they can survive the winter.  I was actually leaning towards letting it all die, and the Creeping Jenny was already looking kind of brown and dried out But – perhaps spurred by a week of almost-100% lung function! - I had a surprise burst of gardening energy and figured I’d try to save what I could.  Here are three of them, stuck at the edge of the back bed.  If they do roo...

So enough about me, you ask – how are all your COLEUS??? (Caution:  the following is intended for Advanced coleus lovers ONLY!) Yes, it’s late August and they are at their peak… well, okay, I guess they’ll peak a bit more in September, but come October, they’ll be gone and that’s it for the year. Front-bed coleus:  these are 40 or so of the ones I divided and propagated under lights and in our windowsills over the winter .  There are five basic models, which I have grown for three years now.  They’re described here:  Meet the Coleus!   All but two of these originated from free (okay, stolen ) cuttings (small ones!  nobody missed them!  I promise!). So here they are.  Not as impressively huge as I remember them getting last year, but maybe they’ll grow a bit more still…     I love how rich the colours get by late summer.  Indoors, they are a pale imitation of their own colouring… sometimes in February I wonder why I’...

So a few weeks ago, one of the hanging grocery potato bags flowered, and then the vines got very long and drooped. So I waited, and the vines got droopier, and finally, on Friday, I thought, “there must be some potatoes there by now.” Well, there were.  Some.  Maybe six? Not counting a few little pebble-sized spuds, here’s what I got from the entire bag.  Nice foliage… almost zilch underground.  :-o     The cucumber (in the right-hand picture) was disappointing also.  I was lazy and didn’t check which type it was (marketmore or Straight 8) but it was unpleasantly bitter.  I was surprised, because the cucumbers we’ve had from the garden in past were always way sweeter than supermarket ones. Two explanations I thought of:  despite the fact that the cuke was growing in a self-watering hanging planter, I was perhaps a bit inconsistent about water.  AND I guess I didn’t really wait for the cuke to ripen fully. BUT I d...

First tomato?  This one’s a Sweet 100 – that’s right, I bought a tomato plant, with all the ones I started from seed.   Sigh… until I become a better gardener, I think there will always be temptations in the garden stores.  This one’s pretty tiny still, but it may indeed prove the first one to ripen!   Here’s an update on all things solanaceae (ie taters and ‘maters): Hanging up – Chocolate stripes in Vesey’s planter vs Early Tiny in homemade planter.  Some flowers, no fruits forming yet.     Other ‘maters: Side door Sweet 100, another shot, not so close up.   Side door Carolina Gold (note kitschy Plant Nanny watering bottle… I bought 4 of these on impulse at Sheridan, and actually think they work pretty well!)   The mess at the side door:  taters and maters and strawbs, oh my!   For some reason, the potato vines totally drooped this weekend.  They didn’t wilt or bend, just keeled over – too tall?...

Gosh, it’s hard to come up with catchy titles. Thought I’d do a garden update, because it’s been a while and we’re having a rainy day, so I can’t actually BE in the garden.  So I’ll start with “things that are hanging” of various kinds. I liked the Home Depot self-watering hanging planter that I have in the front (at left, with lobelia, helichrysum, fuchsia) so much that I bought two more.  It’s a good idea; my main complaint is that the reservoir seems to empty extremely fast. Still, I’m attempting to grow cucumbers in one and tomatoes in the other.  I know, I know.  TWO tomato plants in a single planter of this size is insanity.  One is a small “Tiny Tim” or something, but the other is more full-sized.  I may dig it out and replant it somewhere more suitable.   Each planter also has a decorative “annual” – cucumbers with trailing coleus and tomatoes with purple sweet potato vine.  Much too much plant in one planter, okay. ...