Almost that time of year again or at least in my neck of the woods to start garden planning. Have been doing container gardening the last few years at the lake cabin with mixed results. Last year the deer got my entire tomato harvest the day before I was going to pick. These were in five gallon containers and were doing pretty decent. Electric fence is going up this year.

My most successful attempt so far has been potatoes in fabric grow bags. I'm planning more of them this year. Have a raised bed for sweet corn. Green beans, onions, beets, carrots and a few other things in buckets or grow bags. Peppers of all sorts in self watering raised beds and even some strawberries in a railing container hanging from the deck are in the plans. All sorts of stuff on You Tube but hard to sift through what's true and fake gardening news. So much conflicting information. The guy I have been following the most is MIgardener. He runs and operates a nursery in Michigan so he is close to my climate and I assume he knows what he is talking about given it's his business. Any pro tips appreciated!

I usually do two 5gal buckets, a tomato plant in each. I plant a cucumber plant in one and run a net between them. It works great, I haven't expanded beyond that. Got to have fresh tomatoes for BLT's, Caprese salads and mater sammiches.

I have raised beds as my ground here is unplantable (mostly rock with a little dead dirt mixed in). This year I'm doing six varieties of peppers and all will be going into grow bags. I started them several weeks ago and they're under grow lights now. Habanero, jalapeno, serrano, cayenne, tabasco, and paprika.



I've not done grow bags before, but have had good luck with three gallon pots.

I use mostly starter plants for tomatoes and peppers. This year I'm doing more seeds but not indoors or under grow lights just don't have room of all that. Seeds will be sown directly at time of planting. Carrots, sweet corn, onions, beans,beets etc will all be seeded.

Peppers and tomatoes are the only things I start early. Being up north, there just isn't enough of a season length to direct sow them and expect any fruit before the fall frosts. Everything else, though, (veggies) are seeded.

For about 6 years, I did a self-watering container gardening system that was in grow bags. It was created by a guy named Larry Hall, and he was on YouTube and Facebook. Everything was DIY, and Larry started a company to make it easy to buy the few things you needed at a modest price. One of the FB group moderators was a professor of agronomy, and the group in whole was helpful, knowledgeable, and avoiding expensive gardening. Then, Larry passed away and the FB group changed and the business closed. Larry lived in MN (i.e. same as OP) and there are still 580 videos on YouTube.

He was very creative and he took the idea in 4 different directions:

the original rain gutter system

the hybrid with the 4" pipe instead of rain gutter. This is what I did.

the kiddie pool

the 2 liter bottle

Essentially, I used 2x6 to build a support for 4" pipe and grow bags, used a hole saw to put holes every 18" on 4" pipe, inserted a net cup into the holes, DIY mixed a wicking soil mixture created by Larry, put some wicking soil in net cup and mounded like an ice cream cone, set the grow bag on top of the net cup, filled grow bag with wicking soil mixture, and put in a plant pretty much at sq ft gardening density. At one end of the 4" pipe was a float valve, and the float valve was connected to faucet or a water tank. As the plants drank, the soil wicked moisture up from 4" pipe, and the float valve opened to replace the water. Nice, constant moisture and everything (e.g. tomatoes, peppers, okra, etc) grew well except rosemary (i.e. doesn't like that much soil moisture). I did all of my fertilizing with water soluble fertilizers through the 4" pipe.

Here is a good 3 minute video of someone else's set-up that was similar to mine:


The downside is that the wicking soil mixture would stop wicking as effectively after a season so you had to refresh it. To refresh the wicking soil mixture involved mixing 50% old soil with 50% new soil and you were good to go. However, it meant triple handling 800# of soil 2x per year (i.e. I have 2 growing season here). I originally built in Canada and only had 1 growing season there so it wasn't as much work and the work occurred in much cooler weather. In Houston, refreshing the soil over Labor Day to start fall tomatoes kicked my ass as the heat index is about 108 that time of year, and looking at the future I saw a point in the future where I'd age out of being able to do this soil refresh 2x per year.

I built raised beds and a drip irrigation system, and I'm on my 3rd year gardening in it. Now that it's built it's much less work, and I have 5x the gardening space.

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Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity

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I do a large container for my okra, and two smaller ones (5-6 gal) for my onions. Haven't done peppers for last two years.

I sold a bunch of plastic barrels to a guy that was going to cut them in half to use as growing containers. They would last forever.

Thanks for the post and link tatortodd. Never heard of this guy before but he sure speaks Minnesotan! Some very good ideas in his videos. Most of the links for sourcing stuff are dead. That's too bad.

We don't have a drilled well at the lake cabin so we haul our water up in 35 gallons tanks. But that is to fill the camper for showers and doing dishes etc. I can pump water out of the lake to fill tanks but I don't know if lake water would be good or bad for a garden. Our lake is not considered to be polluted in the least and there are no invasive species noted. Quick internet search says it should be no problem.

What is the distance and elevation from the lake to the garden?

I'm a brown thumb and the braun. I bought a fancy rototiller and designed and installed an irrigation system for about a half acre garden here in the west Texas desert 15 years ago. Despite the effort we didn't grow shit.

Wife is the green thumb and for the last few years has been growing things in anything from water troughs, antique wheel barrows, and wine barrels.

She does mostly tomatoes, peppers, and fresh herbs. She swears by and will only use miracle grow potting mix. We live in sand down here.

She hand waters, if doesn't rain much here,and has been very successful.

Tommy

As a side note my wife is definitely the green thumb in the family and grows a variety of plants and veggies.

We have been composting for about 20 years but really don’t have the patience to leave stuff for 6 months or more until it becomes usable. Then I found out about vermicomposting which is basically placing your food scraps along with shredded cardboard (since we don’t have any leaves here) in a bin with some red wriggler worms and in about 2-3 months you’re left with “black gold” as my wife refers to it.

We mix this in a 1:4 ratio when planting and also use it as a top dressing and it works great. It’s not a fertilizer like Miracle Grow but has the right mixture of microbes so that your soil is “alive”.

Her plants had shrubs are growing like crazy. If you have an opportunity to find some locally and mix it in with your soil you should try it out.

Thanks for the input all. Our growing season is very short. Depending on weather Memorial weekend may be as early as seeds can go in the soil. If the forecast still calls for frost you need to wait. By the middle to the end of September we are pretty much done. Hard to do our own mulch as everything is froze from November until May and nothing decomposes during those months.

I purchased a couple yards of garden soil from a local nursery last year and it wasn't what I had hoped. It was too compact and didn't have enough nutrients in it. I didn't fertilize until it was too late as I figured there was enough in the soil. I will amend that soil this year with bags of the Miracle Grow mix and hope for better results. Around here you really need to get things off to a fast start as there isn't much time for correction.

Every year is trying to trim the learning curve. By the time I'm getting a nice crop for my efforts I will be fertilizing the ground!

quote:

Originally posted by smlsig:
Then I found out about vermicomposting which is basically placing your food scraps along with shredded cardboard (since we don’t have any leaves here) in a bin with some red wriggler worms

Cardboard is full of nasty chemicals. I suppose it'd be OK for flower beds and such, but I wouldn't want any of it in my garden.