A few days ago, I decided to add another container to my container garden. I have an older tote with the folding half lids, but both of the lids were cracked and broken. The tote was still in good shape, and it's a sturdy one, not the softer plastic type. I took the half lids off by pulling the hinge wire out of each side, just to get rid of them.
I had tried using a couple of totes 2 years ago, but they didn't work that well because they didn't have enough drainage. The dirt was always muddy and the potatoes that I planted in the totes didn't do very well.
I decided to drill a bunch of drainage holes in the bottom of the tote before I did anything else with it.
Then I set it in place in the gap between the other containers. I put 2 boards under it to lift it just enough to allow for the drainage to work.
To keep the dirt from washing out through the drainage holes, I put a piece of landscape cloth in the bottom of the tote before I put any dirt into it.
Then I started putting dirt into the tote. I filled it about half way up with the dirt. Since I wanted to plant a couple of potatoes in the tote, I didn't want to fill it more than half way to start. I'll add more dirt as the potato plants grow up. The idea is that if you bury the stem of the plant as it grows, you can get more potatoes from the plant. I decided to plant a couple of the Adirondack Blue seed potatoes, I had a few left over from planting at the community garden.
All I had to do at that point was to cover up the chunks of seed potato and that was done. I'm going to add more dirt as the plants grow.
I had spotty success with germination of the bean seeds in the containers, a bit more than half of the 2 year old seeds came up. I decided to get a package of new seeds to replant the beans that didn't grow. Since the 2 containers in the middle of the 4 had the fewest plants, I transplanted those plants to the outer 2 containers so they would be full, and then replanted the 2 middle containers. Normally I buy Blue Lake Bush type bean seeds, but I found this heirloom variety to be interesting so I bought them instead. These are supposed to be stringless and disease resistant so I wanted to try them.
This is the 4 containers that have green beans planted in them. The new tote container is just past them. You can see the bean plants that are growing in the outer 2 containers. This is after transplanting the plants, and then planting the new seeds.
Here's a look at the container garden area. You can see all the yellow wax bean plants growing in the raised bed behind the containers. There's a cherry tomato plant in the burgundy container just past the blue tote.
Hopefully most of the new bean seeds will germinate for me this time. I'd like to have all four of the big pot containers full of bean plants this year, hopefully I'll get enough beans to can 30 to 40 pints. I'm also looking forward to seeing how the blue potatoes do in the tote, it's a good experiment for my container garden.
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by to check it out!
