I was happy to note that a few days ago, li'l green, white, red and yellow-ish shoots started peeking out from the soil and if I take care of these li'l organic life forms, I'm going to have some salad greens, herbs, tomato snacks and add better nutrition into my lifestyle!
I'm also RE-Purposing many containers! I got baby spinach and lettuce mix each in family sized plastic containers a little while ago and these are being re-used instead of going to the landfill now that I've finished eating the greens. In these containers are - you guessed it - spinach and lettuce mix, in soil, and I'll be able to harvest the leaves in just a few weeks for fresh salad meals and snacks.
When shopping, I've been looking at what kinds of containers are holding the items I bring home. I want to be able to fill the empty containers with something else once the original content is gone out of the container. I never expected to feel this way about shopping, recycling, re-purposing objects when I was growing up but really, I think we all can do more to ease damage and waste to our environment. As well, re-purposing can save money on items I'd normally go out and purchase as empty containers, so there are more benefits to being environmentally friendly than I expected when I first began thinking about making an indoor/outdoor or container garden.
I'm using salad greens containers like in the picture below:
And once I get my digital camera recharged properly, I'll take some pics and show how my own container garden looks. I will do better than the very short vid clip below.
Recycle, Re-purpose, Re-use. I can tell that these three words are going to be very familiar to me from now on, along with the actions that go along with these words.
I know the video clip is only a few seconds but it shows the very small containers I am using to start my garden in. Yes, that little tiny rectangular container at the back is a lunchbox sandwich container - extremely small - but I intend to transplant the plants into a larger container soon. The soil should come out of that box in a little brick and I can just lay it down into a soil filled bucket in a couple of weeks. The little round container is a plastic pop bottle, cut in half with the top inverted to make a very small version of the pop bottle planter I displayed in the last blog post. I wanted to try making a self-watering bottle planter on a small bottle before I started hacking away at larger plastic bottles.
To get a better idea of the scale, here's a snap shot from a vid where I placed an ordinary drinking box in the area and ran the video camera again.
I found some excellent items in my backyard today that will come in handy for my gardening needs this year - some strollers and a li'l red wagon. I started cleaning up the wagon but since it's still really sloppy with melting snow outside, the wagon isn't ready for use yet.
I hope to get my li'l red wagon as clean as the one above in just a few days.
There isn't a whole lot of vegetation going on or to show just yet but I've made a start. The good part of all this is that I've still got a whole bunch of soil and seeds here. As a low income resident in my community, I have a whole store of motivation to grow my own food, save myself money on groceries, eat healthy and stay engaged with this gardening project!
So far, the items I've planted:
lettuce (3 or 4 different kinds, including a red lettuce)
green onions, chives and sweet basil
tomato, cayenne pepper and cilantro
strawberries
spinach
swiss chard (a nice variety, ruby red)
garlic (in the mini pop bottle)
a few bean and pea plants and an experiment with beet seeds (lol)
I may have forgotten something but by mid-week next week I will have put together some containers with more beans (green and yellow varieties) and peas, carrots, parsnips, radish, more lettuce, and more garlic. Once I get to a store that has a better variety of seeds on display than I've found so far, I'll buy more seeds and plant more herbs.
moi~~
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