When I gardened the old fashioned way, summer was full of weeding, pest control and sweat. Not now. Easy condo gardening (in containers) or using the Square Foot Gardening method (in boxes on the ground) means none of the first, and little of the second. The hardest thing about summertime gardening the easy way is patience.
Since adding the bird scare tape, there haven’t been any birds in this part of my garden. No birds in the garden means no damage and more to harvest. The wind keeps the tape moving. The movement, flashes of light on the metallic surfaces and the crackling sound the tape makes keeps them away. Even in the morning, when the wind is very light or non-existent, light reflection does the job. I don’t know why any of this works, but it’s non-toxic, inexpensive, effective and best of all, very easy to use.
Gardeners using containers do have to water more often. The heat of the day and the direct sunlight on the sides of the containers can dry up the soil. The vermiculite in Mel’s Mix helps retain moisture, but I check my garden late in the day, if it has been especially hot. Those days where the temperature reaches over ninety degrees, I water a little in the late afternoon. For me, since there is no water where I garden, it means I have to fill up my five gallon paint buckets where I store water in my garden twice a week. I’ve found a simple way to do this. I had six large plastic jugs sitting in a kitchen cabinet doing nothing. I’ve enlisted them to carry water to my garden. I fill them up at the kitchen sink and place them in the small rolling cart I bought for carrying papers and books back and forth from my car to my classroom at school. It takes only one trip from the kitchen and about six minutes to fill up the buckets on both ends of my building.
But most of the time, all I do is nothing. I water, untangle the bird scare tape around my very bushy Early Girl tomato plant if necessary and go to the beach. From time to time I pull a carrot, cut a zucchini or snip off a cherry tomato or two, but nothing else is ready. All that’s going on is growing. It’s wonderful to see the pole beans climbing up the trellis and the tomato plants setting more fruit, but there really isn’t much else to do. So the rest of my summer vacation will be filled with taking my grandsons on little summer “field trips”, reading and finishing all the little chores around the house that teachers don’t have time to do during the school year. I didn’t know that gardening could take so little time and be so easy.
Until next time,
Elizabeth
