Garden Update
xpost from the gardening forum I'm on far too much.
wanted to share a breif garden update.
For what I've been doing lately, check this post. I genuinely believe the advice therein helped me save my tomatoes.
Otherwise, The summer season is upon us here in texas and all my plants have recieved their summer season fertilizing, dirt topoff, and mulching with a good watering to settle everything in. I think what I'm starting to learn in such aggressive heat (90*+) and especially being a patio garden, I need to water aggressively. I've attached some pictures below from care day (mulching, fertilizing etc, I call that seasonal day "care day") as well as the starts and stuff.
Evolving thoughts on watering
It's commonly said that you're watering the soil, not the plant. So where possible I'm clearing space at the bottom of all my plants to get at the base of them all. I'm starting to settle into a 2x daily watering cadence. Once during the heat at the base of the plant AFTER THE WATER IS COOL to generally destress and cool off the plants, then once in the evening around the entire container to water in the fertilizer and amendments. My thinking is this creates a balance that keeps the soil breathable for the plant while compensating for the extreme heat.
Tomatoes propagations (growing from cuttings)
What do you call this? In any case both clippings appear to be established in their containers and growing since now being able to handle the sun. I hope this is the turning point from them to explode as they have been fertilized and all that jazz. I'm very pleased with this and might look at the convenience of clipping from started plants next season. I will also say tomatoes are helping me understand planting volume to get volume if that makes sense.
Blueberries
I can't tell if I'm doing horrible with these or not, and to be fair, I had to plant them in generic soil and acidify it over time. My understanding is it will take a hot minute for the soil to properly acidify, so I worry that I wont be getting anything worthwhile from these bushes. I want to get better at blueberry bushes so I will continue to crawl the forum for others who are growing them.
Seed Starts - Chamomile, Sweet Peppers (recovered seeds from work)
Guys, I finally got my chamomile to start!! I'm starting to understand the importance of starting you plants on time, otherwise germination conditions make it really difficult to get anything going, I believe I'm also developing an intuitive sense of if the soil is most enough for starting and supporting the seeds. This is going to sound silly but the way I think about it is "is the soil moist and warm enough for me to take a nap in" and sure enough keeping that standard has lead to seeds starting successfully!
Otherwise, Im kinda grateful for my management and coworkers. They've been really good about giving me everything from the utilitarian plastic containers (1,2qt starters and 3-5 gallon buckets) to start my seeds with and usually any clippings or discards I want. So this lead to an opportunity for me to take home a chewed up pepper with a bunch of seeds I've now started in little 1qt plastic containers and I'm happy to say I now have 5 pepper plants already breaking through the soil. Not sure there's enough time to get anything from them but honestly the lesson has been just figuring out how to start different plants intuitively. I will recover all my soil at the end of the season. THAT SAID, I DO hope and expect my chamomile to produce and I plant to harvest as much as I can into large glass containers with the immediate goal of easing into using what I grow by stocking up on various tea ingredients. From there I will graduate to canning and such, but for now I'm just enjoying the intermittent pleasure or picking little tomatoes off my plant and eating them fresh.
Potatoes
I SWEAR these are coming, with a 4 for 10 sale going on I think I'm going to just settle with growing 1-3 potatoes in a 20 gallon grow bag using the hilling method with fertilizer applied after the second hill.
