Just another day in paradise

Not a lot to report, other than the tomatoes starting to ripen, and the beans. Oh, and the peppers. Click on the pictures to see more.

Rewards!

The Container Farmer isn't ready to break out the cornucopia just yet, but lest you think this was only all about the building and planting, behold!
The cucumber and the carrots are ours, along with the nasturtium blooms and New Zealand Spinach in the salad bowl. Oh, and I think there's a bit of sweet onion in the bowl, too.
Always eat your onions. They'll make you strong.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

There's not much the Container Farmer likes less than being led down the garden path. (Whaa... ? Never mind...) So, in addition to the (hopefully) good stuff you'll see here, you'll also get to see the things that go wrong. If, as they say, we learn the most from our mistakes, the Container Farmer must be Mensa material.
We tried fabric (natural burlap) liners in some of our SIPs, before we hit on our current one bucket construction method. It seemed to save labor, and let us get away from having to use two nested buckets. Others have reported success with landscape fabric, and burlap seems to perform well in other landscaping applications, so...
Alas, it seems not to be as good an idea as we'd hoped. Not all of them failed, as you can see, and we think the failures were in areas that were exposed to air, as opposed to being mounded over with potting mix right up to the rim. We think we would not recommend this technique unless you knew you could minimize air contact on the upper side of the burlap, and knew that you would definitely be emptying the container at the end of the season. Your mileage, however, may vary.
We also had a weather related loss, due to heavy rain, and lack of staking. This time last year we were nowhere close to needing stakes.

June is bustin' out all over!

Things are moving right along on the Container Farm in June. A little faster than even we expected! We have little Roma and Black Cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, round zucchini, and carrots! The in ground beans are starting to bloom, and quick, somebody better tell us what to do with all those tomatillos. There will be a bunch of them. We also have New Zealand Spinach coming on, though I'm not really sure what to expect of it.
It's been wet here, interspersed with periods of wetness and occasional rain and wetness. Which matters naught to the plants in SIPs, but hasn't done any favors for the few things that went into the ground.
Here are a few shots of the containers. We'll have to do some reorganizing, and a lot more staking than we expected this early. By the way, the spots on the little round cherry tomatoes are just camera flash reflections. And the little romas are in an experimental leaf/compost/vermiculite mixture with a dry organic fertilizer strip.

55

The Container Farm passed a milestone today, 55 active containers.
OK, that third one is pumpkins and potatoes growing out of a compost bin, but it's still pretty cool. And the thumbnails you get right before you click "Upload" are really small.

SIP construction video

Here's a short video showing the steps in creating a one bucket two gallon SIP.

It's essentially the slide show from an earlier post, but it should be expanded soon to include more information.
.
.

The Greenhouse, and Seeds

The Container Farm has a new addition, a 6' x 8' greenhouse. This saves us having to drag fifteen or so seed trays in and out every time the sun comes out. It'll also hopefully speed up the hardening off process as we prepare to plant more containers.
And, speaking of seeds, next time, we'll go right into 2" or 3" fiber pots with potting mix, rather than peat pellets. The "Jiffy" style pellets worked reasonably well, but the unwrapped smaller peat plugs were unsatisfactory.

Our First Order!

The Container Farm took its first "order" in early April! The requester asked for eleven different items, two each, for a total of 22 containers. As of today, 18 are essentially ready to go, the final four still needing to bulk up a bit before transplanting.

April Showers

OK. So maybe the reason I haven't gotten around to publishing SIP (Sub-Irrigated Planter) construction photos is because I never found a method that I really was happy with.
Or laziness. But probably dissatisfaction. But maybe laziness.
Any way, I finally found a way to make one container out of one bucket, with very little scrap, and not too much work.
Click on the photo to see an album showing how I did it.

March Madness

March was a busy time on the Container Farm. Seedlings to transplant, containers to ready, experiments to begin. The first experiment involves using leaf mulch in place of peat moss in a container potting mix. Four Roma tomatoes, two in regular commercial potting mix, two in leaf mix, one of each set with organic fertilizer, the other with regular. The second tries out a burlap liner in place of the upper bucket in a two bucket SIP (Sub-Irrigated Planter), in an attempt to conserve buckets. The photos links to photo sets.

Two Gallons at a Time

Well, here, at last, is a quick pictorial showing how we constructed a two gallon sub-irrigated planter. One of many, in fact.



Always use safe photographic practices, to avoid the above problem.


.
.

Anticipation

I know, I know. I said I'd publish the step by step for our version of SIPs. I'm still working on it. I want it to be nice, OK? And making some kind of sense would be good too.
In the mean time, today we planted 144 tomato seeds. Yup, One Hundred and Forty Four. Whites, reds, blacks, and a bi-color.

We had to plant something, just to keep our sanity, while slogging through this...
10"-12", depending on where you dipped the yardstick. Four days later the depth is down to about 8", but that's 8" too much for me right now.
I am ready for Spring.
.
.