Starting a new “garden”

In the past I have had a small strawberry garden and some other small plants when I was a kid living at my parent’s house. Now that I have recently purchased my own house I want to start growing some of my own vegetables and maybe some fruit down the road. 

How it started

We had a potato that we hadn’t used and it started to grow some eyes. I figured I would put it in an old rinsed out sour cream container with some dirt from the yard. We cut it into two small pieces, each with an eye that had started to grow. I placed each piece into a separate sour cream container. I was unsure if it would work being a store bought potato but it actually started to sprout after roughly two weeks. 

On another note we took some seeds from a tomato we cut up for dinner and put the seeds in some damp, folded paper towel and put it in a Ziploc baggie. After a few days, I checked the tomato seeds and almost every single one of them had sprouted. I then took out the paper towel and unfortunately some of the sprouts got stuck to the paper towel and were unable to be saved. I was able to replant about 12 of them. For temporary growing I used some old plastic betta tanks and recycled tin cans, all cleaned out with plain water. 

Furthering the plan

I had a few 5 gallon buckets that were clean and unused at the moment. I figured that I could start off with a bucket garden and see how things went from there. However, I still needed a few more buckets and I wanted some potting or garden soil to use instead of back yard dirt. I went to the hardware store and got some potting and garden soils and some more 5 gallon buckets. I also saw some onion bulbs that were 2 dozen for $5 and figured that while I am planting I might as well do some of those and if I could even get 3 of each to grow, they would pay for themselves. I got a bundle of sweet red onions and some Walla Walla onions. 

I got home and put everything together. I drilled holes in each of the buckets, put a single layer of rocks on the bottom of the buckets after rinsing them out and then put a mix of the potting soil and garden soil in each bucket and made sure it was 3-4 inches from the top after wetting it. I put each potato sprout in its own bucket, 2 onion bulbs per bucket in 3 other buckets. 

As for the tomatoes, I am waiting until they get a bit bigger and more stable before transplanting them. For the rest of the onions I dug up a section of the yard and planted them there. It is nothing fancy as I hadn’t planned on getting them so I chose a section of the yard that had little else growing and used a shovel to loosen the soil. I lined the onion “garden” with firewood to help make sure we don’t trample them. Later on I will actually separate the onion patch from the rest of the yard somehow to prevent the grass from creeping in. In the future I will actually have a nicer set up that is separate from the grass. Getting the yard to look nice is a whole other story. 

To help with my gardening experiment I also plan on starting a compost to give nutrients back into the soil and feed my vegetable garden. That will be a whole project and post of its own if I remember to write that one up. 

We shall see how all of this turns out and I plan to follow this up with another post. 

Thanks for stopping by and wish me luck.