Container Gardening for One – Series Introduction

Join me in my series, Container Gardening for One, where I’ll show you how to create a productive vegetable garden in a small space. This is perfect for those living with limited outdoor space! This is the first episode. Future episodes will show the progress of the container vegetable garden for one every couple weeks.

My 2023 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone is 7a.

[Music] Welcome, welcome to my container gardening for one series. And the purpose of this series, as the name says, is really to look at container gardening just for one person. Now, maybe you’re a single parent and there’s two of you or um you’re like me where you just have your puppy here you’re taking care of, but you don’t need a big garden out in the yard. Now, I do have a big pretty good size raised bed garden down there, but the one thing I wanted to try is for myself is to see how far I could push the limit for container gardening. So, what I’ve done here on my deck is I’ve set up a bunch of containers and I’m going to be trying an experiment to see just what can I grow this season in containers. And I mean, I’m looking at the full gambit. I mean, I’ll walk down here in a minute and show you what I have planned, but I’m looking at everything that I am planning in my raised bed gardens. Can I also grow them in container gardening? And I think this series will be good for you if you don’t have a lot of space or you want to try container gardening on your patio or on your deck. And so, that’s what this series is all about. Container gardening for one. So, let me do a quick walk down and I can show you some of the things that I’ve already planted in these containers and some of the things that I do have planned. These here, these are just my blueberries. I haven’t got those in the ground yet, so I wouldn’t count those. I do have three cabbage Danish ball heads heads here. And so, I want to see how that works. I got the rest of the cabbage in my bigger garden down my raised bed garden, but always wanted to see if I could do cabbage in a container. So, I got three of them here. These are just two goji berry that I’m not really counting. But the rest of these, one, two, three, four, five pots here. I’m going to use these for winter squash, summer squash. And I want to kind of interest interested in seeing if I can grow vine type plants like winter squash, summer squash here because what I want to do is my deck railing. I want to see if I can put the vines on there and just let them grow and see if I can have the same effect um growing winter and summer squash. Never tried that before. Always thought it’d be interested to see. So, I’m going to try that here as we go down even farther. This is Hamburg hybrid lettuce that I already have planted. And I have a blueberry plant here and another blueberry plant down there. I got two raspberry plants also down there. Here I have three broccoli that I already put in. Welcome 29 organic. I’m going to put sweet pepper here. And I got two tomatoes. So these are going to be um patio tomatoes. Just cherry tomatoes for right now. So that’s what I’m looking at here. Uh some other things I wanted to try to grow in containers, but I got a lot of containers, but I don’t have as many as I wish I had. So that’s my plan. And I think you know like I said earlier if you are a single parent or live by yourself or you know you just live with your puppy that this is a good experiment to see can you do gardening for one container gardening for one and that’s what this series is all about. So today we’re going to add a few more things to the container garden for one and the first item we’re going to add which I’ve never tried these before. These are sweet peppers that are direct sew, meaning that you don’t have to start them from seed inside the house ahead of time and then transplant afterwards. Never tried to do peppers that way. If you’ve done it in the past and it’s worked for you, let me know. But I got these peppers and they’re called groundfather hybrid. That’s the type of pepper it is. But it’s a sweet pepper. And it says that these are direct sew seeds right in the ground. No need to start indoors. So this is an experiment, too. We’re going to see how this works. So, one of my containers over here I have set up ready and we’re going to be putting these sweet peppers in. The other item we’re going to be putting in the ground today is some tomatoes. And these I did start from seed inside. The first is a called a super sweet 100 hybrid and the other is a patio hybrid. Now, the one is indeterminate meaning that it’ll continue to produce to tomatoes until frost. The other one is determinant. So, we’ll just have one crop and that’ll be the end of it. So, I’ve never tried either of these types before. I got these because they say they work very well in container gardening. So, we’re going to put these in the garden today also. So, for those direct seed peppers, they say to put about four to five seeds in on about a cover with about a/4 in of fine soil. And it takes 10 to 21 days to emerge. So, in this container is about a twoft wide container. I’m going to put in in two spots [Music] here. Four to five seeds seems like a little high to me. So, but maybe that’s because they don’t germinate so well. But let me just put a few in there. We’ll go ahead and we’ll water those So, it’ll be interesting to see how they grow. Like I said, I’ve never used Drexo peppers before. So, we’ll keep an eye on these and see if they do come up and if they are as good as they are advertised. So, the tomatoes I’ll be planting, the Super Sweet 100 Hybrid and the Patio Hybrid. The patio hybrid are only supposed to get to be about 25 in tall. And uh I think if I remember they’re the ones that are determinant. So I’m going to put two in here. And then I’m going to put two of the super sweets in over here. And the rest of them I’ll either be giving away or I’m going to put them in the big garden. But let me go ahead and put the uh patio hybrid in first. [Music] It doesn’t hurt to bury your tomatoes a little deeper than the way they were growing from seed. Actually, they prefer that cuz they’ll grow additional roots. Now, let me just put the uh super sweets in. Charlie’s coming over to check out the tomatoes. So, right now I still have two growing in each of those. I’m going to bring it back to one. I left them that way for now because you never know when you transplant. Even though you season them, harden them off. Every so often they don’t do well. So, I left two of them in there. And I’ll just pick the one that grows best. So now in our garden for one, our container garden for one, we got our strawberries growing. I have two pink icing blueberry plants gone. I have two raspberry shortcakes. Got my patio tomatoes, my super sweet tomatoes, sweet peppers, the Wam 29 peppers, I mean, excuse me, the Wam 29 broccoli. We got our lettuce. We got our cabbage down there. And the rest of those empty ones down there. We’re going to be using those for squash, summer squash, and winter squash. So, we’ll see how it works out. So, thanks for joining me and Charlie on this container gardening for one series. And we have most well about 2/3 of everything planted so far. I look forward to seeing how it is. And I’ll be giving an update every couple weeks. So, thanks again for joining me and we’ll see you next time. [Applause] [Music]