Friday, September 26, 2008

The Great Garden Experiment

This gardening blog has been less gardening and more rambling lately because of my terrible health affliction - my severe case of black thumb. It's quite obvious to anyone who's ever glanced at this blog that I have a bad case of black thumb and I really do not have any real skills when it comes to gardening. But we keep moving forward and I decided it was time to get to the bottom of the actual cause of the dying plants. So we set up an experiment this past weekend to see if we could come up with a cause for all of the death.

I purchased two tomato plants, two bell pepper plants, two pots, a large bag of Miracle Gro potting soil and a container of Miracle Gro liquid plant food. The idea was to plant one tomato plant and one pepper plant in our garden directly in the soil and another tomato plant and pepper plant in Miracle Gro potting soil in pots that are placed in our garden. They'll all have the same lighting and watering conditions since they're only a few feet away from each other. The only difference is the soil.

Aidan helped me plant the tomato and pepper in the pots.
And then we put the other two in the ground.

And per my Gardening Mr. Myagi's instructions, everything in the garden gets the weekly once-over with Liquid Miracle Gro.

It is important to note that I do have some existing tomato plants that are alive, but all my bell pepper plants died a very horrific death only a couple of weeks after being planted. If the potted plants live and the garden plants die, then we have soil issues. If they all die, I should probably give this gardening thing up. If they all live, I will be happy, but very confused.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You don't give up the gardening because of a few plant deaths. :-) Those of us who garden professionally believe we only stretch our gardening when we kill off plants. :-)

You're going to have heat problems with your soil in containers in Florida summers that will really whip plants (too high soil temperatures kill plants). This is why you'll find fall and winter growing (no frost though) a bit easier. No amount of watering is going to make up for too high soil heat.

So - it isn't "you" - it's just a technique or two you have to learn. And given the choice between container gardening and in-ground gardening for results - go with the ground every time.

p.s. learn compost and heavy mulch techniques down there to build up your soils.

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