Garden Progress

My container garden is nearing completion. It has been a long road, since I started with only a big concrete patio, but I’m pretty impressed with how well everything is growing!

My first order of business was building what basically amounts to an enormous sawhorse to hang baskets from. And yes, I built it myself. Tom (step-dad) had to help me stand it up when I was putting it together, but I happen to be pretty handy, thankyouverymuch.

I bought the baskets at JoAnn and acquired some huge redwood tree boxes from a topiary farm in the Valley. Pots came from various sources–a few I already had, a few from Craigslist, one from Armstrong, and a bunch of little pots and seed sprouting trays from an IKEA clearance sale.

I still have to finish painting the sawhorse, build some trellises, and I have a couple of pots left that can be planted. And probably ask my landlord if we can continue with it or not, since I just read in our lease that we’re not allowed to have any pots (and while a lot of my neighbors do, we certainly have the most elaborate set-up). If we’re not allowed to keep it, we’ll be moving it to the drying yard at the grandparents’ house.

Without further ado, here is the garden:

On the right side, in the tree boxes, there are different varieties of berries alternating with pumpkins. The trellised berries are a variety of ever-bearing raspberry. The same kind of raspberry is in the tree box on the other side of the pumpkin, but I’m not sure it’s going to survive the trip from the nursery. On the opposite side of the picnic table are healthy and growing boysenberries and blueberries. All of the berries came from Rolling River Nursery.

See the HUGE bougainvillea? I didn’t grow that. It has been there since we moved in, I have no idea who it belongs to, and it was pretty much dead until I started watering it a few weeks ago. It’s blooming nicely now!

One of my enormous pumpkin plants, which I grew from seed!

The sawhorse:

Those are tomato plants hanging from the baskets (idea taken from Jen’s blog). The tops are planted with cucumbers and scallions. Underneath we have more pumpkins, jalapenos, Japanese basil, piquin rainbow peppers, sage, more tomatoes, cilantro, rosemary, and onions.

So far, so good! I’ve used some of the basil in tomato sauce and am looking forward to using the cilantro now that it’s really growing well. Hopefully the yield will be good and we can do some preserving for the winter!