Bucket Gardening

Bucket gardening is simply my adaptation on raised bed gardening.  Instead of building a structure to hold one large amount of gardening soil, I have divided the soil into 5 gallon increments.  This has worked quite well for me this season, allowing me to custom tailor the fertilizers and micronutrients for each specific garden vegetable.  My experimentation this year has been with cucumbers, broccoli, tomatoes, and peppers.  While I realize that if you had to purchase bagged topsoil to fill all these buckets, it could quickly become expensive, I happen to be fortunate in having several acres of extremely rich, friable blackground topsoil to fill my buckets with.  I start with this as my base to fill 2/3 of a bucket.  I then set in the bedding plants, watering them in with an all purpose, water soluble fertilizer around our frost free date here in Zone 5.  At this point, all the buckets can be bunched together for about a month as they are growing and water and sunlight demand is not high.  As the plants get larger and begin to blossom, they are spaced out a few feet apart in rows.  I then add a layer of bagged moisture control topsoil.  As temperatures rise into summer and plant needs become greater, the watering schedule moves from a couple of times a week to a daily drenching.  My intentions were to set up an automatic watering system, but I have found that, with all the weeding chores eliminated I actually have the time to enjoy the daily morning watering.

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It is now late summer and I have regressed to my natural tendency to make even the simplest of jobs easier.  I have purchased greenhouse/nursery watering supplies and constructed a watering system which allows me to forgo the daily hourly watering and instead simply turn on the spigot outside my house and let the system do all the watering for me.  Special thanks to my neighbor, Ron Marlin of Marlin's Plant Kingdom, for supplying me with the equipment and sage advice on its installation.

Occasionally, entire branches of the sweet bell peppers break off from wind damage.  All of these peppers were originally hung in my upstairs attic space as green, immature peppers.  Over the past 30-45 days they have dried nicely, assuming a radiant red cast and hardening to a brittle, fully dried state.