Deck Garden Journal Week 3

The garden that we've got going on our deck is coming along nicely! We've had a really nice bit of hot weather lately, so it requires quite a bit of watering the plants but they are growing at incredible rates.

One of the things that I learned that seems to help quite a bit with the garden is not just watering the roots, but watering the whole plant. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it, the roots do suck up the water and provide it to the main stem of the plant, but by the time the water reaches the very ends of it, there is likely very little to go around. By watering the roots as well as all of the various branches of the plant, we've had a really great amount of growth and success! I think that's definitely a wonderful life lesson for me.

We added some more plants to the mix as well! We got a Roma tomato plant, one of my wife's favorite varieties of tomatoes. I'm not an incredible fan of them but I don't mind at all adding some stuff for her so that she can enjoy the fruits of the garden as well. The key to these tomato plants is to give them a really good amount of fertilizer!

In the garden that we had a few years ago, I wasn't using the right fertilizer and I also wasn't fertilizing them often enough. The bag that we've got says we only need to fertilize them every 6-8 weeks but I just decrease the amount of fertilizer and fertilize them every 2 weeks for maximum growth.

In the few weeks that we've had the potted garden, doing it in this way has helped out a decent amount to give us consistent growth spread across the time. We've now got several dozen cherry tomatoes growing, with more sprouting up every few days it looks like! This gives us a LOT of fruits, and I think the secret sauce for these plants is the mixture of watering the entire plant as well as adding the fertilizer more frequently, but lesser amounts, than the packaging recommends.

Hell, I may even be poisoning the plants or something lol but I don't think so! The biggest tomato plant had quite a few yellowing leaves on it after a week or so being on the deck but that was before I was watering the whole thing. Since I started watering the whole thing, the yellowing has completely stopped. It hasn't gone away, which makes me believe that it's a little damaged but it's recovering! It's also providing fruit like mad!

The wonderful thing as well is that we've got a hell of a lot of peppers sprouting up! The pepper crop that we've got is absolutely going to be one of the highlights of the year. We started the peppers at the right time for sure, not too early but also not too late. They are growing steadily and we've got a big one that's a week or so away from being big enough to pick. With these peppers, we are waiting for them to start to turn to their true color. On the little information card we have, it says that these are going to be yellow or whitish/yellow. It will be interesting to see what color they end up being!

Some of the plants have gotten pissed because we aren't watering them enough for their desires, it seems and are starting to flower. Some of them I have just let them continue to flower, so that I can give the pollinators a little bit of a treat!

The basil plant is certainly one of the most difficult plants to keep happy haha. It requires quite a bit of water and if we are an hour or two late on watering it, it will start to wither and get pissed, going to flower. I have to constantly pick off the flowers on the plants that we want to keep growing leaves!