POMP- Progress On My Porch: Garden Week of August 7th 2014

I decided the POMP is a better acronym for my porch garden.  P can stand for so many things: Progress, Pictures, Portrait and even Pride- so here we are- new acronyms.

You would never believe that it was August in Temple Terrace to look at all the lush greenery on my porch.  There are three big differences this summer.

1) I put three high growing plants in two crate planters.  The crates were just ordinary craft crates from Michaels.  Each basket is simply lined with landscape fabric and a three equal part mix of potting soil, peat, and perlite- more P's!  

We are thinking multiple P's tonight as a prayer for my sister Beth's wonderful Newfoundland, Smokey.  He had a miraculous recovery from heart trouble this winter, has cancer but is responding well to chemo, and today had another miraculous recovery from urinary problems- so we are all praying for P's!

Anyway the extra depth of soil is really helping the plants retain water in the heat of the day- which is really kept to summer survival.

2) The plants come from Cheyenne's Country Thangs.  Two or three summers back the plants from her shop did very well and this year, I am enjoying that huge basil on the left.  It's very hard to see but on the right is a cherry tomato plant intertwining with my scented geranium and cascading down in front of the box.  And in the back, a Roma tomato plant is coming back after dying back to almost nothing.  If anything will live in the summer, it's a cherry tomato but any tomato this time of year is great.  I'm only getting 10 tiny tomatoes a week- and it's a great little treat that I harvest a few plants at a time!  Anyway- all three plants that are thriving contrary to expectations come from Cheyennes.  The scented geranium is several years old and was not happy in the smaller planters- it is growing by leaps and bounds and came from my other local produce vendor  A Simpler Place in Time.  I'll be using the eggplants from there in my Ratatouille's ratatouille whose success or failure I will post on Friday.

3) The third thing that I am doing differently in the last week that really is helping- is to insert the stem of my watering can into the soil when pouring on new water.  More water gets absorbed by the soil and the moisture gets retained much better.

Here are a couple more pictures from this week:

This is my three tiered wooden garden that I rescued from TTCG Plot 3 when they wanted to discard it last year.  The sage is growing in one of those foldable cloth cubicles full of my 3-P soil mix.

And this is my nursery box.  All these plants are waiting to be moved into the next grate planter.  There is a jalapeño  pepper, regular parsley and curly parsley- all three also came from Cheyenne's.