Freebs container garden

[freebs]

Hey everyone! i wanted to post this to answer some questions from picture comments on my containers this year.

This was the first year i have ever gone completely container, i have usually had a garden but since our soil here is so sandy i haven't had alot of luck with planting in the ground. We used alot of mineral tubs(mineral for cattle come in these and i get them from my parents) this year. I found a place that sells what they call Bio soil. It is an organic state certified compost. We had never used it before but has hear good stuff about it from some of my husbands co-workers. It is pretty cheap we can get a 1 yard load for $16 and they load it! We filled 10 of the tubs on 1 yard! We planted directly into it we did not mix it with anything else. Most of my garden was planted from plants as i have a green house less than 2 miles from the house and they sell there plants for $1 for a 6 pack! The hanging buckets that we did, we re purposed some buckets we already had. We took a hole saw and drilled the hole at an angle into the side/bottom. We took a 1" thick piece of foam and slit it from the edge to the middle. We opened the foam and stuck the root ball of the tomatoes thru it and then stuck it thru the hole. The foam holds the plant and keeps the soil from falling out. I did plant leaf lettuce on top of my buckets and i am glad we did plant something as it did help to hold the soil down and kept it moist for several days. The only thing that i didn't like about the buckets is that they require LOTS of water. Now as the plants grew they did grow up towards the light but when they got top heave(with no fruit on yet) they just laid over. When they started putting on tomatoes they just hung lower. None of the stems broke due to the weight. I did later add more containers, i was out of tubs so i took 55 gallon metal barrels and cut them in half. The bottom half we drilled holes around the bottom for drainage. The tops we put landscape fabric in the bottom to stop weed growth. We also put around the tops of the cut section some old garden hose, that way if the plant grows over the edge it doesn't get cut off due to the sharp edge. We water about every 2 days i just set the water in the tub and let it fill till its running out the drain holes. Thanks everyone for the great comments and i hope that i answered all your questions. If you have more ask and i will try my best to answer them. Oh and we did not use any fertilizer or insecticides that were not organic. I treated my powdery mildew on my squash with a milk bath. You take 50/50 milk and water and put in a spray bottle and saturate the plant and spray the soil also. This also works on cucumber plants and zucchini plants.

[mauimagic]

Mahalo for the great explanation of all that you did. I sure loved looking at all of your pictures!! You are definitely a successful gardener!!