It’s been a very productive summer on my deck, though. No denying that. Tomatoes, peppers, herbs galore. I had a great potato harvest a week or two back, but it was during the period that I was camera-less so there is nothing to share. The potatoes were super easy to grow though, and very tasty. Reds, blues, and golds.

One particular disappointment was my edamame plants. I had a couple of them, and they grew like mad. And they fruited like mad. But the pods never really filled up much, so I never actually got to harvest anything. Perhaps the growing period wasn’t long enough? I’m not sure. I got them out pretty early. It’s a shame. They were very pretty though, with nice white flowers, so I will probably give them another go round next year.

A few things are still struggling to fight the good fight. One of my most productive tomato plants happens to be a breed that I don’t even know, it was a stray seed – I’m kicking myself cause I wish I knew what it was. I would plant even more of them next year. It’s still managing to put out some little green jewels even this late in the game.

I am, of course, bringing some herbs back in to keep with me in my kitchen through the cold winter. And I pruned and brought the plumeria inside so it could go dormant. Same with the asparagus.

But I have left the rest for the birds and the bugs.

Another bit of disappointment came in the form of my shiitake log. It failed to produce even a single mushroom, even after I followed the sprouting instructions very specifically. At this point, it is too cold for me to attempt to restart production with it, but I should be able to keep it through the winter and make another attempt in the spring. The spores will survive.

The lack of mushrooms is a bit fortunate though, as my pregnant wife – normally a huge lover of mushrooms of all kinds – can not even bear the smell anymore. Funny how that works.

But these disappointments are very minimal considering how much I got out of this garden this year. I learned a ton – actually managed to keep some plants alive – and even got a few garden fresh meals out of the deal, too. I’ve started to do some bits of planning for next year, but at the same time I’ve had other concerns to be planning for as well. Still, I’m excited to use this knowledge I’ve gained next year and see what kind of accomplishments I can manage to wrangle out of the dirt and the sun.

In the meantime though, it’s time to just kick back and enjoy the scenery for awhile.

The fruits of my gardening labors have been coming in somewhat slowly, but very steadily. I have three different healthy Green Zebra tomato plants, and two Early Girls – making for a pretty steady stream of tomato production, but never really leaving me with more than I can deal with. I also have one Cherokee Purple plant which has one great big tomato on it, but only the one. Both the Zebras and the Girls have so far turned out to be extraordinarily delicious.

Unfortunately I’m losing maybe a third of the tomatoes to blossom-end rot, and as I’ve mentioned before there is a pretty much constant onslaught of these tomato hornworm bastards. They are huge, and have an appetite to match.

I catch at least one or two every couple of days.

The black chiles are maturing to a beautiful bright red color that practically glows.

They have about the same heat as a jalapeño but a little smoother flavor, it’s a more subtle heat.

My plumeria has started flowering.

Plumeria is a tropical plant used in Hawai’i to make leis. It has a wonderful fragrance and a flower that you don’t typically see in Northern Virginia. My father realized years ago that he could bring plumeria back from the islands (where my brother and his family have lived for nearly 20 years now) and grow it in containers here, back east, while bringing it indoors to go dormant through the winter. This is the first year I’ve grown any but it’s doing very well out on the deck.

I’m also embarking on a new project – growing shiitake mushrooms. I’ve done the whole mushroom-kit-in-a-box thing, with some success now (grew them in a kitchen cabinet), so I wanted to move on to something new. It also didn’t hurt that one of the main purveyors of shiitake spores and logs in this area has been a close family friend for years and years – Paul Goland of Hardscrabble Enterprises. He doesn’t seem to have much of a web presence, though.

There isn’t much to show you now, cause all I’ve got is a log with spores injected into it and sealed. I’ll show you anyway, though. You ready for it?

Here it comes.

Log!

You can see the spots where the spores have been implanted. To start production, I have to “shock” the log into action by placing it in cold water, fully submerged, for 18 to 24 hours. So I have to give it a bath. Then, mushrooms will emerge in a few days and be ready to pick a week later. Up to a dozen crops may be induced every 6-8 weeks during warm weather, and the log will supposedly last up to 3 or 4 years.

I’m going to start production on it this weekend, hopefully. Can’t wait to see what happens.

I hope everyone’s been having a great summer.. it will be September in the blink of an eye. I don’t think I’m really going to do any secondary fall plantings, but maybe. I’ve already started to plan what I’m going to do differently next summer though.

Turns out, it rained quite a bit while I was gone and there was some pretty remarkable growth. Coming back to see how things changed was really thrilling, in a way that I think you may not totally understand if you haven’t been through it yourself. I certainly wouldn’t have.

But I’ve now finally eaten some real actual (and delicious) vegetables grown from dirt and pots on my back deck. I have successfully eaten (as opposed to attempting to eat and failing) three Early Girl tomatoes, and two green bell peppers.

Before leaving for our trip, there was one tomato on the Early Girl plant, and two bell peppers. That’s it. Everything was a decent size, but no real vegetables showing.

After coming home, things in my garden had exploded. I’ve got four Czechoslovakian black hot pepper plants, showing sixteen black peppers now – of varying sizes. I’ve got one green bell pepper plant with three peppers on it. I’ve got two yellow bell plants showing six different peppers between them.

Two of the black pepper plants are in one of my favorite containers… I ran out of pots.

And the tomatoes are really starting to take off. Mostly Green Zebras now – they are seventeen Green Zebras (none large enough to eat just yet), and six Early Girls. The Cherokee Purple is doing well too, but no tomatoes yet. Same with the soybeans – huge vines growing like crazy, but they are not showing any beans just yet. I’m not really sure what their time to maturity is though.

Also, potatoes and asparagus. The potato plants are huge and healthy, but of course I have no idea what kind of potato production might be going on underground. As for the asparagus – that’s a bit of an experiment, as they are not said to do well in containers, and they won’t be putting up shoots/spears for another year at least anyway. You can see the asparagus fern there in the front.

Compare that one to how those potato plants looked a month ago.

It’s wonderful to see it all coming to life so vibrantly. It totally changes the atmosphere hanging out on my deck, too.

What I’ve tasted so far has been incredible. I can’t wait to see what the coming weeks and months will bring.

When I first started writing about my vegetable container gardening, I had no idea I’d want to do it so frequently. So I apologize to those who have already had enough of it, but I can’t really help it with things moving and changing so rapidly as they are.

It’s been only about two weeks since my last post about this, but the garden looks drastically different now.

The tomato plant, a Green Zebra, which had been uprooted and thrown all about has made a great recovery.

I’ve got some other healthy looking tomato plants, too.

Those above are both from seed. I also picked up an Early Girl tomato plant a couple weeks back and it’s already starting to produce.

If you go back and look at that last post that I mentioned, you can see that the potato plants were just starting to break the ground.

And now, two weeks later..

These have been my fastest growing plant so far. They are just huge already.

I can’t wait to see what comes out of that dirt.

I lost a couple of the soy/edamame plants to rot as their soil stayed too moist, but the others are thriving. The soybean plant is a vine so it’ll grow all up and around the railing.

So I’m really happy so far with what I’m seeing. Already, even at this point, this is more success than I’ve ever had with *any* plant, let alone this many. I’m retaining a “believe-it-when-I-see-it” attitude towards results I’ll actually be able to eat, but we’ve been eating salads (lettuce and radicchio) from the garden for awhile now – there is enough to eat for 2 just about every other day. Though I expect the heat will put an end to that soon enough.

Bell peppers are really ready to eat any day now. Maybe I’ll have one tonight. The black hot peppers are a little slower going.

And at the wife’s request, I had to get some flowers in there somewhere.

Things are just getting warmed up and I love it.

I knew pests were going to be my number one issue with container vegetable gardening out on my deck, but I didn’t think they would hit so soon. The other morning, I woke up to find my best tomato plant dug up out of the soil, all my potato containers rooted around in and seed potatoes dug out and tossed around (but none missing), and a bunch of other general garden vandalism.

I suspect it was raccoon, for several reasons. First of all, it didn’t actually eat anything. There were no greens missing, no potatoes stolen, nothing. Just a bunch of stuff messed with. The paw marks in the dirt, where it had dug things up, were far too large for any squirrel – that would have been my second guess. And, whatever animal did this, there was no urinary evidence left of any sort – which pretty much rules out Stomper. He was my first suspect, but surprisingly, so far he seems to have very little interest in my plants and my containers at all. And I know that if it had been him digging in there, he would have surely left a little gift for me as well.

I’ve seen a raccoon up on my deck before, once. So I know they can get up there. And it did really look like the damage had been done by a fairly large creature. I didn’t have the heart to take too many pictures at the time, but you can see here what’s left of what was once my most developed tomato plant.

I’m going to be surprised if he pulls through. I’ve got a couple other tomato plants I started that are okay, but they are all pretty small. I wanted to start them from seed, but I may replace this one with a market bought heirloom or something. We’ll see how he does.

To make matters worse, we were pounded repeatedly with some serious storms last week. For some of my plants this was a boon, but for others not so much. Have a look at this example…

I’ve had five soybean plants growing in this container. Two have drowned, one is questionable, and two others are loving it. The container should be fine in terms of drainage, got lots of rocks and shards in the bottom and I even drilled extra holes, but the soil has been so moist for so long now that the two dead soybean plants have visible stem rot at the bottom of them. But you see the one plant to the far left (with the blue tie) – that one has done great. Not sure what accounts for the discrepancy here – the one which was once the healthiest plant (with the yellow tie) was the first of them to die.

On the other hand, the lettuce and radicchio is growing like crazy.

I think I’m going to harvest for a salad or two this week. The radicchio should be red, but everything came up green.

And, against all odds, the potato plants are coming up nicely despite the fact that they were all completely removed from the dirt just a few days ago. I re-planted them and put them up on higher ground on some chairs, so we’ll see how it goes with that.

I’ll probably plant a few new soybean seeds, but all in all the garden seems to have taken the hits pretty well. I’ll have to see if the animal returns to decide whether I need any sort of more significant protection from it, but for now things seem to be pretty quiet. I like to hope that whatever it was didn’t find what it was looking for and won’t return any time soon anyway. I guess I can be a bit naïve like that.

It’s going to be a long Summer.

I’m actually doing pretty well, I think. I had been hoping to put things outdoors 24-7 a few weeks earlier, but we have been having pretty cold nights all throughout April so I have kept things inside for the most part. I would put them out for a few hours if we had a sunny day but then bring them back in under my kitchen grow lights for the night and that has worked well so far. We also had a lot of rain in April – go figure – so they did spend a lot of time growing indoors.

If you’re just joining me here on my gardening adventure (thrilling, I know!) – check out my playing with dirt post to see where I got started.

None of my salad seeds (radicchio and looseleaf lettuce) germinated in the seed starter thing I had going, but I noticed that some random seeds I had put in an old pot outside from last Summer were actually doing kind of well. So I decided that I’d try starting some new salad seeds and just leave them outside. I purchased a salad grow bag, filled it with some organic container soil, and made a makeshift little greenhouse out of a garbage bag with holes in it for a little extra warmth. I don’t know if this was really a good idea or not, but it seems to have worked. The grow bag product leaves something to be desired, for sure. The pictures at gardeners.com show it having fairly substantial sides and able to stand up on it’s on, but in reality it’s pretty flimsy and not at all mobile – if you lifted it up you would disrupt all the dirt and seedlings. I put a large plank of wood underneath it so that it would still be at least semi-mobile.

So most of my salad seedlings have sprouted now but none of the radicchio is actually red or anything.

I also have a promising tomato seedling that is doing better than any of my other stuff – but I don’t know which kind of tomato plant it is. The seedling was a stray which grew outside of my intended container. I suspect it’s Wickline Cherry since that’s what it was closest to, but it could also be Cherokee Purple or Green Zebra.

Other seeds that have sprouted include quite a few Czechoslovakian Black Hot Peppers and Yellow Bell Peppers. And I’ve got five very healthy looking soybean plants that I’m pretty excited about too.

The soybean was exciting coming out of the ground. One grew a bit earlier than the others, and then four others followed in rapid succession. They look like something out of Super Mario Brothers.

I then transplanted them to a larger container, which I’ll leave near the railing of my deck. Soybeans grow like a vine, so I figure it’d be good to have something for them to cling to.

I’ve got some herbs going too but nothing that I’ve grown from seed. I decided to start a basil garden and I’ve got two Genovese plants and one unknown basil something to start it with. I’ve also got cinnamon basil, Thai basil, lemon basil, and purple basil, but all of those still have to be germinated from seed.

I have this really cool old piece of ceramic pottery that I inherited from my grandmother. It was supposed to be a fountain, but I was never able to find a water pump small enough to fit in it.

If anyone can identify that plant in the lower front there, that would be awesome. Got any ideas? I’m 90% sure it’s a basil plant but I suppose it could be something else.

Other than that, I have some dill, sage, thyme, and oregano.. and a few stray strawberries popping up in a container from last year. Oh, and I’ve got some organic seed potatoes (gold, red, and blue) which I’m rooting right now and will be putting in the ground (in a container, that is) probably in the next week or so.

I really have no idea how much of this stuff will make it through the summer, and even more how much of it will actually put out a harvest. I’m excited about the progress I’ve seen already but let’s just say I’m taking a highly skeptical position towards it. I expect that it’s going to be really hot and sunny out on my deck come July and August, and I’m more than a little worried about pests. I’ve started watering the plants with a mix of cayenne pepper and water in my spray bottle to hopefully deter animals but so far that’s really the only precaution I’ve taken.

I also just finished reading Second Nature by Michael Pollan, which was a fantastic book. It’s less about gardening specifics than it is about what man’s relationship to nature is and has been in recent history, and why and how social attitudes have shaped the way we look at everything from the suburban front lawn to chemical pesticides to the (sometimes not so) subtle sexuality of the rose. It’s a great book and I’d highly recommend it to anyone who has ever even had a remote interest in the natural world around us – not just those who have been inclined to get out and dig up some dirt every now and again.

What’s your favorite thing about nature? Or your least favorite?

My parents always did (and still do) a great job with it. They have maintained beautiful gardens there for almost as long as I’ve been alive. I’ve worked many hours over many years in those gardens, doing anything from mowing lawns to planting azaleas to cutting down trees. And I grew up with a great appreciation for it.

So you’d think I’d know a thing or two about successful gardening. You would think I might have a bit of a green thumb, with that sort of upbringing. Unfortunately, you’d be dead wrong.

I have killed nearly every plant that’s ever come into my life. Mercilessly. In some cases you might even think it was a pre-meditated act. If you asked me the color of my thumb, it wouldn’t be green. It would be black. See, look – it’s true.

I am determined to remedy this major inconsistency in my life. What better way to do it than through something I already know I love – fresh food? It doesn’t get any more local than your own home.

So this year is the first year that I’m seriously undertaking a gardening effort in my own home (albeit on a deck). I have been growing a few kitchen herbs under a grow light for the last two months (mint, purple sage, oregano, and parsley) which are doing well (the parsley has a bit of a fungus issue I’m working on but it washes off). I will be moving these outside in the coming weeks.

And I got some seeds. And some dirts. And some stuff to put them in. I had some help putting it all together.

His name is Deathface Happy Stomper. You’d think it’s a cute ironic name, but it’s actually ridiculously appropriate. He’s the cutest total asshole I know.

I moved my kitchen herbs from their small shared pot into larger pots to prepare for the move outside. And I planted a bunch of seeds to keep inside under the grow light for awhile for germination. What did I plant?

I planted…

- edamame / soybeans
- 3 kinds of tomatoes: Cherokee Purple, Green Zebra, Wickline Cherry
- 2 kinds of peppers: Sweet Yellow Bell, and Hot Czechoslovakian Black
- Salad greens: lettuce and radicchio

I also have some heirloom blue, gold, and red potatoes coming in the post but they haven’t arrived yet.

There wasn’t really any method behind the seeds I chose. I realize I probably could have put a little more thought behind what might be more successful for my growing conditions, but, well… uh…

So I’ve now got the herbs and seeds all under grow light about 22 hours a day. As soon as it’s just a tad warmer (probably this weekend if all goes well) I’ll start moving them outside for a few hours at a time. Of course, I’ll keep you all posted on the progress (assuming there is any).

All done for now!

Got any advice or suggestions? PLEASE – I need to hear it!