Patio Gardening 2010: Week 7 – Transplanting & Harvesting
This has been a somewhat eventful week concerning our container vegetables. We finally finished transplanting–all of our pots are full and as long as they all survive the transplant, there will be no more transplanting this season! We still have some seedlings left, so if something dies off, we could potentially transplant something else into the pot. Fingers crossed that all the plants lived.
Another thing we did this week was thin out the extra seedlings, just so each pot has the correct amount of plants for it’s size. The pink window box is another story, though we thinned out the green onions some and transplanted that rogue tomato plant.
The plant promptly wilted immediately after transplanting (which you can see below), which freaked me out, but it bounced back by the next morning. It’s bigger than any of our other tomato plants so far, so I hope it will soon start producing cherry tomatoes.
This week I was glad to see the first flower on our zucchini plant with another bud ready to bloom soon. I need to do some research on pollinating the zucchini plant because I’ve heard it can be difficult.
We had some good and bad experiences with the bean plants this week. Last week the first bean pods appeared. This week, all of the bean plants seemed to be effected by the sudden heat wave last week (we went from highs in the 60s to highs in the upper 80s). Many of the leaves have turned a little brown, and some have shriveled up. The most interesting thing was the effect of the heat on the bean pods on one plant.
As you can see, the pods curled into a little spiral. My research found that it was probably caused by the heat. I went ahead and plucked those off, along with the dead leaves.
In good news, we were able to do our first harvest on Sunday, plucking off 6 large bean pods. There are more little bean pods growing, and I think a few more will be ready in a couple days (I picked 2 more pods this morning).
The cucumbers that were wilting previously have been absolutely thriving, so we re-potted 3 of them into a bigger pot to see how they’ll do. So far so good. Some of them are developing buds.
Here’s the video for the week:
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.