The Southsider Voice
Visit us at these places!
  • Home
  • News
    • Top Stories
    • Sports
    • Car Nutz
    • Stilley Goes Trackside
    • Southside Deaths
    • Personal Recollections
    • Reminiscing
  • About the Voice
  • Advertising
  • Contact
  • Newspaper Archive
  • Classifieds

Get ready to start planting those seeds

5/17/2023

0 Comments

 
Picture
These are the sunflowers that grew out of one of our smaller pots.
(SOUTHSIDER VOICE PHOTOS BY STEVE PAGE)

By Steve Page
Correspondent

OK, a confession of sorts.

We have not yet planted the seeds that we checked out of the Decatur Township Library.

We first referenced them April 26 in the Decatur Township edition of the Southsider Voice.

My wife, Vicki, and I are more into flowers, especially sunflowers.

I did obtain some seeds for tomato plants and green beans, though we have not yet attempted anything like that on the third-floor deck of our apartment building.

But we will try.

After all, Vicki wasn’t convinced that the sunflower seeds I planted last spring would come to fruition.
But they did!

See the attached photos.

So with that in mind, I did check out the library item that showed which plants grow best in pots: basil, carrots (which require a deep container, which we do not possess), cilantro, dill, garlic chives, kale, Allstar leaf lettuce, marigold, nasturtium, oregano, peas (which require some sort of support), peppers, radishes, spinach, Swiss chard, tomatoes and zucchini.

Of course, the old zucchini joke while I lived in Colorado was that you could just throw the seeds out the door and the zucchini would grow. We actually planted them in the garden, and yes, they did grow.
I’m a fan of chives, and have always grown them in the container in which they arrived, already grown. They’re one of my favorites, because you can bring the container inside in the winter, and they continue to produce chives year-round.

I had to go online to look up nasturtium, and discovered that it is a flowering plant, with bright red and yellow flowers. Not sure if they’re edible.

Anyway, back to the containers.

Specifically, the containers on our deck.

The largest are about three feet across and three feet deep, though we do have some smaller ones that also produced sunflowers.

We discovered the bigger the pot, the bigger the sunflower, though ours, thankfully, were not those real tall ones you see growing by the side of the roads, especially in Kansas.

I do admit that I planted our sunflower seeds a bit late last spring, but obviously, not too late.

It’s all quite different for Vicki and I, since we moved from a house where we had a garden.

There, we tried many things, though we were entirely successful with tomatoes in large pots. One year, we didn’t plant until returning from vacation, and it was difficult finding any tomato plants. One place said that they had a windstorm and all the tomato plants ended up in a big bunch.

So I took the bunch, then spent hours separating them before planting them. Then they took off. We weren’t sure what they were, since they came without identifying signs. Turns out one of them was a tomatillo plant.

Once we discovered those strange-looking tomatoes, they turned out to be delicious, especially when it came to making salsa.

We let them grow as late in the season as possible. When the weather forecast finally called for frost and/or freeze, we picked them. One plant yielded 48 nice-sized tomatoes.

We let them finish ripening in the kitchen, though we had to watch for fruit flies.

We also grew green beans that grew well on a slatted fence. We tried strawberries and were told that after a year they would sprout out new plants, but that didn’t happen much.

We grew cantaloupe one year, but sadly discovered that you have to pick them before the bugs get to them.
Tried okra once. Learned you cannot let them grow longer than a couple inches, or they turn to wood.

We’re ready to start planting our seeds, but I’m already interested in something that’s already growing in one of our big pots. It’s green, and a few inches tall, so we’ll probably plant around it and see what grows.
Happy planting!  
Picture
A large pot produced our largest and tallest sunflowers last summer, and at this juncture, they were still growing.

Picture
​Sunflowers grow out of one of our small pots, with the buds just beginning to appear.

Picture
These are three of the plants on our third-floor deck last summer: a growing tomato plant on the left, chives in the middle and our coleus, which has wrapped around the deck rail on top.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    December 2023
    November 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    July 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014

    Categories

    All
    Arts & Entertainment
    Lead Story
    Sports: 500
    Sports: Basketball
    Sports: Track

    RSS Feed

 DROP OFF: The Toy Drop 6025 Madison Ave., Suite D
Indianapolis, IN  46227  |  317-781-0023
MAILING ADDRESS: P.O. Box 17187, Indianapolis, IN 46217

[email protected] | [email protected]
Website by IndyTeleData, Inc.