Patio Gardening 2010: Week 4 – Wilting Cucumbers
We’re done with the fourth week of our container gardening adventure.
The temperature in Chicago decided to drop again this week, so while we were in the 70s for awhile, we’ve dropped into the 40s & 50s, so the plants have mostly been indoors for the past week, just because it’s warmer.
Unfortunately this week our cucumbers started to wilt. I did some research and the best I could guess was maybe we were over watering. It is possible that the temperature drop may have effected them. We cut back the watering and let the soil dry completely inbetween. The stems have firmed up some more, but the seedlings aren’t looking so hot, so they may not survive. In the end, we may just plant another round of cucumbers in bigger pots.
Our beans have been growing so well that we had to transplant them this week, so that was our big adventure. The boyfriend is so concerned about how tall they will get that he bought cages for our four bean pots. Hopefully they’ll survive the transplant and prove to be fruitful. If not, we’ll just try again.
We also transplanted a few of the tomato seedlings that were getting pretty big. We have a ton of seedlings for basically everything (the boyfriend’s philosophy was to plant every seed we had because he didn’t think we’d have much success growing them. Boy was he wrong!), so I don’t know how many of them will be transplanted into bigger pots. It is nice to have a lot of back ups though.
What have we learned so far? We may have planted the seeds a little too early, but since the containers are portable and can be brought in when the temperature drops, it’s not that big of a deal. Also, we could have planted a lot less seeds at once. We will probably have a surplus of seedlings.
This week it looks like the weather will just be in the 50s and 60s, so we’ll be keeping the plants indoors. Hopefully it will warm up again soon and we can move them outside permanently. We’re running out of room on our windowsill!
Check out the boyfriend’s latest video:
For those who are new, this year the boyfriend and I are doing a little container gardening experiment where we are trying to grow various herbs and vegetables on our patio. We live in the city of Chicago, so traditional gardening is out of the question. You can subscribe to the RSS feed to instantly receive the posts each week and also check out our previous posts. Feel free to subscribe to our Youtube channel as well.