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Newbie question about shade
On Sat, 01 Mar 2003 17:03:56 -0500, Minteeleaf
wrote: Pat, what containers did you grow the lettuces in? How deep, how wide? How many times a day did you water, & what varieties? We had a stroke of really good luck and found a huge pile of big black plant pots at a dumpster - not pretty ones, functional ones. We had lots for ourselves, plus enough to share with a gardening friend here. There are two sizes: large and VERY large. I used them. The larger ones are probably about two feet deep and about 18" in diameter. I don't think you need most of that depth though, especially not for lettuce. I put pieces of window screen over the holes so the soil wouldn't wash out (I always do that with potted plants). That way, you don't need rocks in the bottom. In the absence of finding containers, I think I'd use 5-gallon buckets if I had any, or laundry baskets lined with a trash bag. Laundry baskets lined with a trash bag should work pretty well. Storage containers (if cheap or if you already have them) will also work well. Anything really. For lettuce, you should be able to use much smaller pots. I think even a gallon-milk jug (bottom half thereof) would grow leaf lettuce OK. We are also able to buy a pick-up truckload of spent-mushroom-soil very economically and I used that to fill the containers. It's great for container gardening - light and fluffy and all the plants thrived, almost beyond belief - everything did extremely well in it. If you are having a sizeable container garden, I'd think (unless you can find mushroom soil or something similar) that the cheapest way to fill the pots would be to buy 40-lb bags of top soil, and mix it about equally with peat moss and sand to lighten it up. If you buy potting soil, you'll go broke, besides potting soil alone is too heavy for containers, IMHO. You can buy a big compressed bag of peat moss pretty cheaply at garden centers and sand is cheap. The 40-lb bags of top soil are pretty reasonable too. I didn't need any fertilizer because the mushroom soil is very like composted manure (has a lot of composted manure in it), but with the sand/moss/top soil mix, you'd probably need to feed your plants occasionally. I think any balanced plant food (or even manure tea) would work. Miracle Grow isn't organic, but it is cheap and it works. I watered the pots every day (after things had grown a little)- but it was easy, easy. There's an outdoor tap on the deck, so I just used the hose to water. I bought a watering wand, to attach to the hose end, so I could put the water exactly where I wanted it. The watering wand is well worth the money (about $5.99, IIRC). Watering once a day was fine except for the Yellow Pear cherry tomato. It grew to be a HUGE plant and required watering three times a day in its black pot so we took a large Rubbermaid storage container (22 gallons) and punched holes in the bottom and transplanted the tomato plant - by then about 5 feet tall - to the Rubbermaid container. We had a tomato cage stuck in the container, for support. Then it was OK. (I hadn't intended to grow the Yellow Pear tomato in a container, it just sort of happened.) Varieties - I didn't keep track last year (I will this year). I'll tell you what I remember though...Peppers - we bought little plants, there were green peppers plus hot peppers, variety unknown. I grew Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, also Tom Thumb (baby Boston-type), also a romaine. Bok choy: bought the seeds at Agway, they just said 'bok choy'. Beets: I think they were Early Wonder. Basil - bought it as a plant. Swiss Chard - the variety was Fordhook Giant. The Swiss chard, even growing in a pot, btw, stayed happy and productive until the temperature hit 12 F in November. I pulled the lettuce out of direct sun into the shaded part of the deck (part of our deck is roofed) on the hottest days. During hot spells, I just left it there in the shade for several days at a time. It did quite well like this. Otherwise, the answer for lettuce, IMHO, is succession plantings each week during spring and again in August for fall growing - but not in mid-summer. It doesn't like really hot weather. You can plant lettuce around things: around beets, for instance. A beet seed encircled by lettuce seeds. This makes a good use of the space. I'll also do this with carrots and lettuce this year. And of course, you can eat beet green thinnings - they're the best green of all, IMHO. Mintee, if you can get hold of a library book entitled 'Square Foot Gardening' by Mel Bartholomew, a lot of his ideas are adaptable to container gardening. You can space things VERY closely in containers, because they're having such ideal conditions. There's a website too: http://www.squarefootgardening.com I found that cabbage moths did find the plants in containers and they ate the collards and some of the bok choy (we'd already had a lot of the bok choy ourselves). This year, I've bought floating row cover (Reemay) and I'll cover my cabbage family plants with this in an attempt to foil the cabbage moths. I bought it at either Gardens Alive or Mellingers, I can't remember which. (URLs are the obvious ones in each case.) I had no other insect pests at all in the container garden. That's about it, I think. Have fun with it! Ooops, I see now that you were specifically asking about lettuce - well ... you'll probably have more info here than you wanted... 'cause I've written about other things too. Oh well. Better too much info than too little. Pat -- CLICK DAILY TO FEED THE HUNGRY United States: http://www.stopthehunger.com/ International: http://www.thehungersite.com/ |
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