Sunday, January 29, 2012

Seed Catalogs and Gutter Gardening

The seed catalogs arriving in the mail has me thinking of gardening! Last year I fizzled out, only growing a few plants that I bought at the farmer's market. We got some beans that reseeded themselves and some wonderful banana peppers, but the tomatoes died off pretty quickly, other than the red currant tomatoes (which were supposed to be yellow, but they were delicious no matter what what color they were). This year I'm going to plant peas in the bed we grew tomatoes in in the hopes of restoring some of the nutrients.

This year I'm hoping to get back on track. On the Square Foot Gardening forum I found a reference to gutter gardening so I went on craigslist and posted an ad requesting free gutters and I got some within a couple of days! I haven't dug into how we're going to hang them yet, but I'm excited about growing some lettuce in them as an experiment. The idea of vertical gardening fascinates me for some silly reason. There's a cool idea called a pallet garden that I might try too, although I worry about chemicals from the wood leaching into the soil. There's a Youtube video of creating a pallet garden online. Maybe I'll just plant flowers in that one, although I'm tempted to plant strawberries after seeing a picture of a strawberry pallet garden.

I have tons of seeds so I don't think I'll need to buy much, but it's hard to resist the beautiful pictures and the fanciful descriptions.

Here's hoping I find the drive to garden this year!

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