Now that I have three self-watering containers with vining vegetables – one tomato plant and two cucumber seeds – I need to figure out the best way to trellis them. Since my balcony garden is not huge, I need to utilize the limited space the best way that I can. What I don’t want to happen is the for the plants to grow out of control like my cherry tomatoes...
Author Archives: Mike Lieberman
I’m gonna get philosophical and say that I am not a gardener. I am Mike, and I grow food. Yes, this might seem contradictory considering the site is called Urban Organic Gardener, but I have to use the term gardener because that’s what people associate with what I’m doing. There is nothing wrong with gardening, but it’s just not what I do. To me...
Three months after starting my balcony garden, I was able to harvest my first balcony garden salad made up of romaine lettuce and kale. This was a much different experience than when I harvested my first fire escape garden salad in NYC. Last year I was pretty overwhelmed that I was able to trace my produce from fire escape to bowl, but this year I have a different appreciation...
The dill seeds were planted sometime in the beginning of June. To make sure that I continually have dill available to be I did some succession planting of more seeds. Succession planting is when you plant seeds in a way that you continually have a fresh crop available. Once one crop is harvested, there is another growing right behind it. This is great for small space gardening....
Most of my planting so far have been of one single herb or veggie in a container. This time I decided to get creative with a herb container idea – I surrounded calendula with basil, cilantro, parsley, and oregano. I know that’s pretty crazy. It’s summer time, and I’m feeling frisky. Chopsticks were also reused as row markers to tell what the hell...
One of the reasons that people won’t start growing their own food is that they say that it is too expensive. There are free and cheap resources out there, you just need to seek them out. Here are some ways that you can make gardening cheap, so that you can start to grow your own food. Local Department of Sanitation or Office County Extension They usually have...
I’m using the worm leachate that was produced by the Worm Factory 360 in my garden. The leachate was mixed up with 3 parts water and put into a spray bottle and the plants were sprayed down. Since my kale leaves are yellowing, aphids have infested my purple kale and cabbage worms wiped out the oak greens, I’m hoping that this will help to help both fertilize...
I haven’t had the best of luck on my balcony garden. The oak greens were wiped out by cabbage worms and the purple kale had an aphid infestation. Now the leaves on my kale containers are continuing to yellow. From what I’ve heard and read there a bunch of causes for the leaves of kale to yellow. It could be a lack of nitrogen, so I added coffee grinds to...
A few weeks ago the cabbage worms killed the container that had the oak greens in them. This week an aphid infestation has wiped out the container with the purple kale. The natural garden pest control worked well for a bit, but I couldn’t keep up with them. There were massive gray clumps of them on the plant each time I went out there. When I had my fire escape...
I’m not really into gardening books because in my opinion most are boring and don’t hold my interest. This made me a bit hesitant to read Grocery Gardening by Jean Ann Van Krevelen (@JeanAnnVK) since she is a friend of mine. My beef with most gardening books is that they are usually written for people that are already into gardening and over the heads of people...
Here’s another creative gardening idea for those of you with limited space. It’s a self-watering container made out of a 2 liter soda bottle. This self-watering container is made out of a soda bottle, an old t-shirt (or cotton string) and some newspaper. That’s it. Hard to get much cheaper than that. I had seen the idea on Instructables a while back...
It hasn’t been a great week for my balcony garden. First the oak green leaf container was infested with little black eggs that I later learned was cabbage worm crap. Now my tomato seeds that were doing so well have all died. I had each of them planted in a plastic strawberry container. Last weekend I went away from Friday to Sunday. When I left on Friday morning,...
The green oak lettuce on my balcony garden has not been doing well at all. When checking out the containers the other day, I took a closer look at it and noticed little black egg looking things that were accumulated at the bottom of the leaves. I have no clue what they are, but can only describe them as caviar looking. They didn’t budge when I poked the with a stick...
I knew that in coming to LA that I would be able to have the balcony garden and was hoping to expand beyond container gardening into actual soil and land. Luckily, I’ve been able to get access to a huge (at least it’s huge to me) amount of backyard space thanks to David, a friend of Anita. He has offered up his backyard in Reseda to start gardening and growing...
Yes it might sound obvious, but when you start your seeds make sure that you have a container to transplant them into. I didn’t and had a tray of dead seedlings. This could very well be one of the biggest gardening mistakes that I’ve made. Last week the seedlings were slanting a bit. This week they are all dead. A few of the pots were popped open and the roots...
I had my first problems with garden insects a few weeks ago. I wound up wrestling cabbage worms and fighting aphids. Since then, it got me thinking…What would Mr. Miyagi do when faced with cabbage worms and aphids? It came to me. Mr. Miyagi would use natural garden pest control, so would I. I’ve been using chopsticks to pick the cabbage worms off the purple...
The leaves around the base of my kale and lettuce plants are yellowing around the base. I’ve used coffee grinds as a fertilizer to help with this issue. I think two of the main culprits causing the yellowing leaves could be lack of drainage for the soil or nutrients. I don’t think it’s drainage because there are plenty of drainage holes drilled at the...
It’s been a little over a week since I started the experiment with planting the same set of seeds indoors and outdoors to see which would do better. There were two sets of four different kinds of seeds that were planted in toilet paper roll seed starter pots. They were leaf lettuce, basil, sunflowers and calendula. At this point, the seeds that were started indoors...
After you are done with your coconut, hollow it out out and use it to plant vegetables with shallow roots in them such as lettuces and other greens. Much like the toilet paper roll seed starter pots, these are the great price of free. What you’ll need to get your coconut shell container made: Coconut shell Potting mix Seeds Spray bottle filled with water Drill...
