Urban Organic Gardener

We know that you need to feed your plants and amend the soil in your container garden. Here is a quick how to on amending the soil. You’ll need the following: Container that is free of plants Cultivator Compost Water How to amend the soil: Use your cultivator to break up the soil Add some compost to the container Work the compost into the soil Water the container and let it drain through Your container is now ready for the next round of planting. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIv2lkvxX2A ...

“Garden Writers Today” is a website (www.digplantgrow.com) for garden writers (duh) that’s been created to help the garden writing community. More importantly, it’s been created to help the readers of gardening websites, which is even more important. They wrote to me and other garden writers across the web asking, “What Can ‘Garden Writers Today’ Do For Me?” Since the main reason that I keep this blog is for you to help encourage and inspire you to start growing your own food, I pass along...

I’ve made another gardening mistake. This time I didn’t separate the plants when transplanting them into the containers on my balcony garden. When I did my first round of planting on my balcony, I popped the plants out of the plastic and just planted them into the container. This seemed like a good idea, but wasn’t. There were about 4-5 plants per bunch. They grew for a bit and I was able to harvest a salad from them, but they were growing very slow and having some other problems. Initially the plants were taking a while...

One of the things that I was most surprised during my trip to Costa Rica was how little the restaurants used locally grown produce. It became even more apparent to me how we have lost touch with our food. There were coconut trees nearly everywhere that you could turn. Yet it was impossible to go into a restaurant and get fresh coconut water. Some of the restaurants actually had signs saying that they were out of coconut water. All they had to do was go outside and pick up a coconut off the ground. The trees were steps outside of their...

I am going away on vacation and this will be my last post until August 30, 2010. Please do your best to get by without me. I have been thinking about changing the focus of this blog to include more about the importance of growing your own food. For the past year plus this blog has been about growing your own food and how to do so, which it still will include. I want to write and discuss more about the importance of growing our own food, what’s involved in it, the growing, harvesting, sharing, preparing and still focus on the how...

Now that I’ve remembered to amend the soil in my container garden, I’m going to be running a side-by-side test of soil amendments. Here is the test that I’m going to run. I have two cucumber containers on my balcony garden. In one of them, I have amended the soil with straight compost. The other container I have watered with the cow manure tea that I brewed up. The plant that I used the cow manure tea already started out slightly smaller than the other, but I want to test and see if the manure tea help to promote better...

I am making cow manure tea to use as a soil amendment in my container garden. I’m brewing cow manure tea from Authentic Haven Brand. The brewing process will take 1-3 days to complete. You’ll need the following: One five-gallon container filled with water Bag of cow manure tea bag Towel or cloth to keep the bugs out You just need to drop the tea bag into the bucket of water and let it steep for 1-3 days until it looks golden brown. Put a cloth over the top of it if you are keeping it outside to keep the bugs out. For more...

One of the mistakes that I made last year was not feeding my plants and amending the soil in my container garden. When you first plant the potting soil that you use should likely have all the compost, nutrients and minerals for the plant to initially survive, but over time the plant will use these up and they will deplete. If you were growing in the ground, the soil would likely take care of itself with the worms and everything that’s going on underground. I was a having a discussion with someone the other day about this and it makes...

Thanks to everyone who submitted a comment to enter for a chance to win 6 packets of seeds courtesy of Botanical Interests. There were 61 comments submitted. To select the winner, I used Random.org to randomly select a number between 1-61. The number generated was 21. Counting from the top the 21st comment was from….Snow. Not sure if it’s the 90s white reggae artist from Toronto because if it is that would be awesome. The comment that Snow left was , “I love my urban veggie and herb container garden! I encourage everyone...

When you started to plant your mesclun seeds, you likely just threw some seeds in your container and watered them to see what would grow. I know that’s what I did. Now that they’ve started to grow, you’ll need to thin out your mesclun plants to allow the strongest ones to survive and produce more. Yes, the container might look pretty with the purples and greens, but this is about growing food, not about looking pretty. All you’ll need is a pair of scissors (or your bare hands). Go through the container and pick...

In order to keep your tomato plant thriving and producing more food, you’ll need to train it upwards in addition to removing the suckers. The purpose of training your tomato plant is to keep the plant from getting to heavy and falling over. As it begins to blossom and fruit, it will start to slouch. To keep it from doing so, you’ll need to train it upwards. In a small space there are a few ways that you can do this. Regardless of which way you choose, you’ll just need some rope/string and some scissors. On my balcony...

Once your tomato plant starts to grow, you will want to prune it to remove the suckers. They will start to grow regardless of how you take care of your plant. You might notice them as your plant is growing, but think nothing of them. Suckers won’t harm your tomato plant, but will prevent it from producing more fruit. A sucker is off-shoot growth that grows where the stem and a branch of the tomato plant meet. It doesn’t serve much of a purpose. If you pick them off it will help encourage more growth because the plant can focus...

Pretty much everywhere here in Cali fennel is growing. It’s one of the most invasive weeds in the state. I see it growing in peoples yards, along the sidewalks on trails when hiking. I really don’t think that most people are aware of what it is and that it’s food that they can eat. It’s free food that is growing everywhere. Fennel can be used to make teas, in salads, juices… The other day when I was walking around the hood, I chopped some off a stem from a fennel plant that was growing along the sidewalk....

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 did on my balcony last year. I’ve been starting to look around for items that can be reused to help grow the plants upwards instead of outwards. The railing...

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 gardening is what Fern, Teresa, Jenny and Jean Ann do. I gots no beef with gardening and what they are doing. When I think of gardening, I think of pretty landscaping...

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 considering all the problems that I’ve had with the cabbage worms and aphids. As I was picking my lunch from the self-watering containers, I came across a...

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. I never did it on my fire escape garden, but am trying it for the first time on my balcony garden. Initially there were two rows of dill seeds planted. Now there...

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 was planted where. There were four sets of calendula seeds that were planted in the center of the container. To the top of basil about five sets of basil seeds were planted....