I can't believe I didn't post about our contaner gardens last spring! In the Houston area, the county extension office in association with Texas A&M University offers cylinder gardening 'kits' that containers, lesson plans, organic fertilizer, and seeds to schools for FREE! They include everything but the soil and welcome homeschoolers.
A lady delivered our supplies. The containers are big pails which have been cut in half so they have no bottom. We put newspaper at the bottom of the containers so weeds wouldn't grow up into them.
We added the soil and planted the seeds as the lesson plans stated. We had 4 containers. Two were vegetables (beans and radishes) and two were herbs (I believe dill and parsley).
After planting the seeds, we watered them. Here you can see our four containers. They're around some lantana which already attracks some butterflies.
Our first little plants... just 3 days later!
And, here are our bean plants 6 weeks after planting!
And, one of our first radishes. I've never grown any food before and we both thought this was so exciting. I was amazed how God could take a little seed and 'program' it so that it could turn DIRT into something edible!!! Amazing!
Little purple flowers on our bean plant.
A TINY snail we found on one of our plants.
Some of our dill.
And, one of our beans. We got LOTS of beans off of these plants.
Anyway, the deadline for signing up for this program is at the end of the month. I'm debating whether we'll sign up or just plant some of our own seeds. When you sign up, you get whatever seeds they happen to send. We still have our containers set up, so I'm thinking about just buying our own seeds to plant. I'm excited that planting season isn't too far away for us. Last year, we planted during the first week of March.
Oooh we love container gardening here! We always buy our own seeds or we buy the mini plants and go from there. It is just so rewarding when you pick that first fresh veggie and know that you were the one that made it happen. Have fun if you decide to do it again.
ReplyDeleteI think the herb in the picture is dill.
ReplyDeleteYou know? I think you did mention something about this program, but just never showed any pictures. It's cool to see it all in one post. I wish we had a similar program here, but it looks pretty easy to set up. I've always wanted to try something like this and include all the stuff we typically eat in a salad.
ReplyDeleteI love these close up pictures you take. I can't do that!
ReplyDeleteBlessings,
Laurie