Many many years ago, we had two garden beds and our first harvest was out of this world. Our tomatoes and lettuce and perilla leaves grew so well that we thought the following year we would have an even better harvest. Unfortunately that wasn't the case and our tomatoes got ill (I didn't know you were suppose to plant them in a different spot) and our vegetables and fruits were more susceptible to critters who enjoyed a free buffet (they called their friends who called their friends and so on). And so after the second year we took a year off of home gardening and tried to pick it up again the following year without much luck, or if I'm being more honest, much motivation.
This year though we decided to get seriously again and instead of putting back garden beds (we got rid of the ones we had and planted grass seeds over the spots) we thought to give container gardening a chance and purchased a bunch of grow bags from Amazon. We used to order our seeds through Plant Good Seeds but the past two years we went with Kitazawa Seed Company.
We are growing a few things, including some new vegetables that we have never grown before.
Currently in our grow bags there are lots of tomatoes - Momotaro, Odoriko, Grandeurs and cherry tomatoes too. They don't look big in the picture above but they are massive now and flowers have bloomed. I have been shaking them to help pollinate in hopes that we will have a good harvest. I am quite excited for our tomato varieties this year!
We also have cucumbers, hobak (round squash), put gochu (Korean peppers), Shishito peppers, lettuce, perilla leaves, rosemary, basil and parsley.
Unfortunately the spearmint we had planted was a dud (it might be our planter actually because we had thrown some lettuce seeds in there and none germinated and the same happened to the spearmint). And we had very high hopes for our bak choy, which were thriving but then the slugs got to them and now we may just give up on them altogether (we used eggshells and a spray from Dr. Earth, which didn't help). I was quite excited for our bak choy but after our experience with slugs I don't think I ever want to plant them again! Eep!
All in all the grow bags have been wonderful but I am not sure if I will use them again - or perhaps I just need better planning. We'll see how our summer harvest does and see if we'll do a fall vegetable garden and re-evaluate our experience then.
In the meantime, we eagerly wait for our cucumbers and peppers and hobak and the rest of the vegetables to grow to harvest!
Happy gardening!
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