adventures in green living: the victory garden

So, i joined the 20 million plus Americans who decided to grow their own food this summer, saving money while still eating healthy and organic. I have grown flowers and herbs in the past, but this is my first experiment with organic veggies. Living in metro atlanta, my outdoor space is tiny, but we have a container garden going full blast. This spring I started two tomato plants, one heirloom and one "fast-growing" variety, an orange bell pepper, carrots, thai basil, and mint. Also sugar snap peas, which unfortunately, got too much sun and sizzled up after only producing about 6 (delicious) peapods. So far we have harvested a few tomatoes and 2 peppers, but we have 4 peppers ripening on the vine now, and the tomato plants are flowering and starting to produce more. I love checking on the progress every day,although I wish it was happening more quickly! Can't wait to see how the carrots turn out. Our neighbor has more outdoor space and has a giant garden going, and across the way are the stables for the downtown horse carriages, so occasionally you hear horse hooves clacking down the street. Also the stables have a rogue rooster, on their grounds who is crowing all the time. So although we are totally urban down here, there's also a whole lot of country going on. :)

Anyway, we are watering our crop with runoff water from our air conditioning unit, it's all collected in a big bucket that I dip the sprinkling can into for watering. I haven't used the hose at all, which is great. Lately I've been dreaming up a self-watering system for next summer, and running hose from the water collection bucket to the veggie containers, through osmosis or something. I've got to do a little more research on that.

The other day I decided to buy some plant food to keep the veggies growing strong, and I was happy to find Terracycle Plant Food at Home Depot. I read an article on the company several years ago, about how they make organic fertilizer from worm poop. The plant food mix is bottled in recycled soda bottles, so it's a very sustainable, eco-conscious company, which I love. You use it 1X a week, pouring directly into the soil. Should be interesting to see how it works.