I have discovered gardening through my efforts to get parents, in
retirement community, going on container gardening.

First off, tomatoes. We bought the oddest looking tomatoe plants at
Walmart-they were short squat wide with stems like tree trunks. They are
doing fantastic and survived some reaaally cold nights when they
shouldnt have been left outdoors. A tomato ?bud? has formed already and
we are still in a possible frost scenario here.

Next, radishes. I bought some of those peat pellets and am attempting to
germinate radish seeds. I am afraid the 3 seeds per pellet ended up 6
seeds so it may fail.

We are using white wastebaskets ($2) from Dollar General for the
tomatoes because they are deep and look so nice coordinated to the white
pvc patio framing :-) I walked around in Home Depot the other day and
would love to try to create a pvc garden sculpture!

During the downsizing most of the gardening equipment went before
realizing some of it should have been hung on to. I bought a nice
Craftsman ss spade w ergo. handle at Kmart for $3.49 on sale, and went
with Martha's seeds from Kmart.

Now my sweet corn questions :-) It is not feasible to put in long rows
of corn in the communal garden area. More for the thought that counts I
wanted to do a 4ft square patch of corn just so they would have a few
stalks. I purchased silver queen sweet corn seed. How loose is loose
soil-and just loose underneath the seed or all around also? What do
sweet corn roots do? It says 2inches of fine soil on top of the seed-I
was going to use potting mix on top. Also, and this is going to be
really dumb, is there a top and bottom to a corn seed and which part
goes down? Some of you talk about soaking-doesnt mention that on the
package. Last, there is a seed corn field nearby-is that going to cause
a problem?