I’ve made another gardening mistake. This time I didn’t separate the plants when transplanting them into the containers on my balcony garden.

When I did my first round of planting on my balcony, I popped the plants out of the plastic and just planted them into the container. This seemed like a good idea, but wasn’t.

There were about 4-5 plants per bunch. They grew for a bit and I was able to harvest a salad from them, but they were growing very slow and having some other problems.

Initially the plants were taking a while to grow and after harvesting they weren’t growing back very much at all either. So I decided to just pull them up and start the container anew.

When the plants were pulled up, sure enough they were still in the shape of the plastic that they came in and the roots weren’t very well established. All reasons that the plants should’ve been separated before transplanting.

Now that the plants are out, I’ll reamend the soil and get something new planted in those containers.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2celm8P9Np8

One of the things that I was most surprised during my trip to Costa Rica was how little the restaurants used locally grown produce. It became even more apparent to me how we have lost touch with our food.

There were coconut trees nearly everywhere that you could turn. Yet it was impossible to go into a restaurant and get fresh coconut water. Some of the restaurants actually had signs saying that they were out of coconut water.

All they had to do was go outside and pick up a coconut off the ground. The trees were steps outside of their stores. It’s not like they had to travel far. There were some entrepreneurial people who were selling the fresh coconuts though.

Some of the restaurants and places that I stayed in only had canned coconut water. It was appalling. There was fresh, locally grown food all around, yet they were selling some canned processed version of what they had available at their fingertips.

One of the places that I stayed at had papaya trees growing on their grounds, but in their breakfast fruit salad they were using chemically sprayed apples and oranges shipped in from Chile (yes, I checked the labels).

When I was in a supermarket, I noticed that the produce was “California Grown.” I didn’t travel all the way to Costa Rica to eat Cali grown produce.

It makes more sense to me in the States how sourcing locally grown produce can be more of a challenge. I don’t expect restaurants to source 100% of their food locally, but when they literally have the stuff growing on your grounds or within feet of them…come on now.

They could even take it one step further and grow their own produce to utilize in their restaurants. They all have the space and certainly live in the climate.

Are we that out of touch with our food and our food systems that broken?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwqNrUGLQbA

When I left for Costa Rica I purposely didn’t have anyone water or take care of my balcony garden. I wanted to test to see how well self-watering containers really worked.

All of the reservoirs were filled up the day before I left and were unattended during my vacation. When I got back, nearly all of the reservoirs were empty, but the plants were doing well.

The tomato plant set more fruit and had more blossoms, but some of the branches of the plant were dried up. The cucumber plants were blossoming. The carrot, mint and lettuce containers were also doing well.

This proves how easy and low maintenance growing your own food can be. My self-watering container garden went over two weeks during the Southern Cali summer without being watered and was still OK.

Though I wouldn’t recommend regularly going two weeks at a time without watering your garden, the excuse of not having the time to water isn’t an issue. Now stop reading this and get to growing your own food.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xgVRBJHuM0

I am going away on vacation and this will be my last post until August 30, 2010. Please do your best to get by without me.

I have been thinking about changing the focus of this blog to include more about the importance of growing your own food.

For the past year plus this blog has been about growing your own food and how to do so, which it still will include. I want to write and discuss more about the importance of growing our own food, what’s involved in it, the growing, harvesting, sharing, preparing and still focus on the how to part as well.

I’ll cut back on this site as a journal for exactly what I’m doing and only mention the cool things (which will be difficult since everything that I do is so cool) and projects.

This will help to expand the site to give reasons why it’s important to grow your own food and how you can grow your own food. One plant. That’s all you need to grow to make that difference.

Hit me up with your thoughts on this direction. If you likes. No likes. Would like to see other topics. The same. Lemme know your thoughts, and I’ll get at it when I gets back.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1FP28HdmC8

One of the questions that people frequently ask me is revolved around the health concerns of growing in the plastic containers.

Is it safe to grow in plastic containers? Is it leaching harmful toxins into the soil, water, plants and eventually my body. I honestly have no clue, nor do I claim to. I think there is a valid concern in those beliefs and generally avoid plastic, but I rationalize doing so in a few ways.

• The containers are being saved from the landfill. While this doesn’t directly effect my health. It does effect the health and well being of the planet, which in turn effects my health. None of the containers were purchased. All of them were already used.
• I’m growing organically. The soil, plants, compost, manure tea and even the water is filtered. Does that counter balance any potential leaching? I dunno, but in my mind in kind of does.
• Since I don’t have land, what am I going to use if I don’t use plastic containers? I’d have to buy pots of some sort which would increase the amount of money being spent and resources used in the production of the pots.

I don’t know the exact health effects and carbon footprint of everything (I don’t believe that anyone really does). For the reasons mentioned above, I can rationalize growing my own food in plastic containers simply because I know how the plants are being taken care of and am cutting down severely on the transportation costs of the food.

What are your thoughts on this?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlVjk7jXQtM

Now that I’ve remembered to amend the soil in my container garden, I’m going to be running a side-by-side test of soil amendments.

Here is the test that I’m going to run. I have two cucumber containers on my balcony garden. In one of them, I have amended the soil with straight compost. The other container I have watered with the cow manure tea that I brewed up.

The plant that I used the cow manure tea already started out slightly smaller than the other, but I want to test and see if the manure tea help to promote better growth.

I’ll monitor progress and report back in a few weeks. Which do you think will yield better results?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRvZ_KKVKlY

I am making cow manure tea to use as a soil amendment in my container garden.

I’m brewing cow manure tea from Authentic Haven Brand.

The brewing process will take 1-3 days to complete. You’ll need the following:

• One five-gallon container filled with water
• Bag of cow manure tea bag
• Towel or cloth to keep the bugs out

You just need to drop the tea bag into the bucket of water and let it steep for 1-3 days until it looks golden brown. Put a cloth over the top of it if you are keeping it outside to keep the bugs out.

For more complete instructions on how to make manure tea check out ManureTea.com.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEqI2VL8w3o

One of the mistakes that I made last year was not feeding my plants and amending the soil in my container garden.

When you first plant the potting soil that you use should likely have all the compost, nutrients and minerals for the plant to initially survive, but over time the plant will use these up and they will deplete.

If you were growing in the ground, the soil would likely take care of itself with the worms and everything that’s going on underground.

I was a having a discussion with someone the other day about this and it makes perfect sense why you would have to amend the soil in your container garden. The reason is because it’s contained…hence the name container. Nothing is added to it unless you add it.

In my online networking on Twitter (@CanarsieBK), I connected with a company Authentic Haven Brand Products (Twitter: @GreenSoil) that provide soil amendments in the form of cow and horse manure tea. Sounds great with some breakfast.

Cow and horse manure might sound nasty to put in your garden, but it makes sense. What happened before garbage got picked up? Cows and horses crapped on the dirt roads and it got buried under the soil. It’s natural.

While speaking with Annie, I learned more about the company and her product. AHaven has been a small family owned business since the 1920 and all of the animals are allowed to roam free and are treated humanely (for an animal). This is the kind of company that I can support.

I got me some cow manure tea that I am going to brew up and use on some of the plants. Some benefits of it are that it’s quick releasing and it won’t burn your plants. Read up on some more benefits of using manure tea in your garden.

I’ll be running some experiments on plants using the cow manure tea, vermicompost and whatever else I can get my hands on. You’ll have to stay tuned to see the results.

Most importantly -- Don’t forget to amend the soil in your garden and feed your plants!

What do you use to amend the soil in your garden?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=drjXz7RppKE