OT: Growing Veggies if You Don't Have Much Space

Here's my wife's Topsy Turvy planter with tomatoes, green peppers and a cucumber plant. This would be ideal if you don't have a garden space. She has another planter when the plant is
planted in the bottom and hangs down. It was loaded with tomatoes last year. Hal

NICE!

we have garden too, 16 tomatos, 14 peppers, 10 summer sqursh, there's bit more but we dont have alot room or sun!!

it be nice to have 10 acres where I could plant some sweetcorn and more. I could make an Veggie stand too, hard work dont brother ME.

have 4020 and planter but dont have the acres.
any one want help me on that? Omaha Ne.

steve
steves tractor and planter.

I used an Old Roy dog food sack for my Topsy Turvy. Their a woven plastic fiber. Only fear I have is that the cotton strings might rot out to soon. Next time I'll restitch them with plastic baler twine. They are working great and didn't cost anything. A plastic barrel makes a great potato grower. Put some small gravel in the bottom, about six inches and drill a couple small drain holes, but not too many or too big. Put a little dirt on top of that and plant the spud. As the potato grows keep adding dirt so as not to cover all of the leaves. Water daily and alot. When the barrel is full of dirt keep watering hard and alot. Rain water works best if you can catch it. If the the leaves start to yellow back off the water a bit. When the plant dies don't think you have to "dig the spuds" right away. They will keep growing as long they have water for about ten days to 2 weeks. To harvest, tip the barrel over and roll it around. Kids love this part. If everything went even half good you should get a couple of 5 gallon buckets of yukon golds. Tires work too. Keep stacking them as the plant grows. Water is the key. 5 gallons when the barrel is full isn't too much. Taters are about 85%
water. Good luck.

That sweet corn sure looks nice. I would like to have a little more ground. I have about about 30 tomatoes and 8 pepper plants in that little garden behind the planter. I have some on wire cages made from heavy reinforcement wire.
That's more than enough for 2 of us and our daughter always want some. Hal

One other good feature is you don't need to weed.
Hal

another good and easy way to plant is inside of concrete blocks, put the blocks along driveway, or flower beds and fill with good soil. No weeding and easy to water, when crop is harvested pull out plants and remove blocks. Good luck Amo

I have about a tenth of an acre garden. Grow beans, squash, sweet corn, watermellons, tomatoes, broccoli, potatoes, a few flowers and basil. One thing you can do in a small space is follow-up planting. Plant beans after radishes, lettuce or spinach, or let squash or pumpkins run in the corn. Put cukes on a trellis. This year I tried planting double rows of beans and will do a second planting when these get a bit taller. A good book on companion planting is "Carrots Love Tomatoes" by Louise Riotte. Tells which veggies like each other and which do not.

Larry in Michigan

do any of you do the CANNING put in JARS?

I grew up doing that with both my sides familys. and every one dones it, it all started in the 1930's! can't remember how many jars we have and some broken some are new!

am going to do it this year. yeah I have some green beans too hope it keeps up.

When I was single, I did the canning, freezing, jam-making, and bread baking. Nice to have a wife to do it now.

Larry in Michigan

My wife still cans tomatoes. We wash them, then I scald them and my wife packs them quart jars.
She just made strawberry preserves too. Will do tomatoes this summer.

When we were kids both our parents canned everything. Her mom and dad even made saurkraut and they made applebutter by the copper kettle every Fall. They canned sausage, green beans, lima beans, beets, cucumber pickles, peaches. A lot of this was put in 2 quart glass jars. My wife's mom said she canned 200 quarts of peaches when they were on the farm. They didn't go to the store all the time like we do now. They raised everything. They canned sweet corn too. My wife would freeze the corn. She always cut the kernel's off and scrapes the cob to get all that milky juice. It always tasted like it just came out of the garden. I always grew Silver Queen corn it looks like field corn from the tall stalks and big ears. We all grew white potatoes
and sweet potatoes. My nephew still does canning and has written a book on it.

My mom's sisters canned a little different they used tin cans for canning. They even put their
sausage in tin cans. Just about every farmer had hogs back then a few to sell and a few to butcher.
That changed around here when you couldn't ship milk if you had hogs. You could take your grain and corn to a grist mill and have flour and corn meal made. My wife's mother said they had a barrel of each made. Looks like we may be heading back to some of our old ways. A lot of kids growing up now don't even know where milk comes from. Our daughter wasn't old enough to remember milking then we took her to the PA Farm Show in Harrisburg and the farmers were milking their cows. The milk was being piped into a cooling tank and you could see the milk flowing.
I'd better shutup. Hal