Beginner Gardening: How much time do you spend gardening?, 1 by Jaywhacker

Jaywhacker wrote:
I posted a picture of my grow pole garden on this thread on April 12. Here is a picture of the same scene taken today. As you can see, things are a-cooking out there.The pole on the right has some winter sowed phlox with batchlor buttons in the top pot. and convovulus in the bottom pot. Behind it is a pole with dusty miller and petunias. The pole on the left has more batchelor buttons and begonia. Behind that is a pole of dianthus pinks and begonia. You cant see them but lots of chives have been poked hither and yon in the pots for their flowers. And there are 36 strawberries in the little terracotta stackers in the center of the table. Farther back in the photo, you can see a couple of sunflowers growing out of the top pots of two grow poles. I plant the grow poles intensively and they will take that because they have a fast draining grow mix and plenty of moisture and oxygen to the plants roots.

This thread started out talking about how much time we spend in our gardens. This grow poles have turned out to be a tremendous time saver for me. The weather has now become hot enough so that I can water all of them with an automatic timer once a day. I do that early in the morning and later in the day I check with a moisture meter and tap the few pots that need it with water. Stuff like the sunflowers and tomato's need that extra tap of course. During erratic spring weather I was walking around stabbing the pots with a moisture meter and hand watering where necessary.

I have 20 grow poles with 4 pots each which gives me 16 plant sites per pole for a total of 320 plant sites. Plus many of the sites have more than one type of plant in them. I poked onion sets into lots of the pots and have harvested most of them as green onions already. You can get some "free" small bok choi's by planting them with something else and then harvest them in about 30 days while the sites other plant keeps on growing to maturity. The same thing applies to many types of fast growing spring greens which will grow and then harvest out of the way so the sites long term plants can grow on to maturity. And you can do all this without bending or stooping.

You can start your own plants from seed and transplant to the poles or purchase plants from a nursery. It takes some planning to have new plants coming along to replace plants you harvest (in the case of vegetables) or pull out in the case of spring blooming flowers which have completed their bloom season. I pulled some "tidy tip" flowers out of the poles this morning so those sites are now open for something which I have growing in my nursery area.

My 'nursery' area where I continuously grow from seed is on table tops. Again, no stooping or bending necessary as I transplant from nursery to grow pole. It may sound labor intensive to keep over 300 plant sites producing at the same time but it really isn't. I mostly plan on plants that can be direct seeded and easily grown and plant more seed than I think I will need so I usually have more plants than I have plant sites.

The ideal place to start seed though is on some grow poles. They provide an ideal germinating site. Think about this: On a four pot pole with 16 plant sites and only 5 seed planted per site, you have 90 plants if they all germinate and they really germinate good on these poles. And you can easily plant more than 5 seed per plant site. Another example of how productive these grow poles can be with minimum labor is that the 4 plant sites from which I just pulled the "tidy tip" flowers this morning are now available for propagation. Im thinking I might go out there and spend a few minutes poking 20 to 40 seed in those sites. 15 to 20 days from now, I will have transplants. Now to decide what I wont to plant. Decisions, decisions, decisions. I'm just tired out from making all these heavy decisions. :-)

It has taken me about 5 years to accumulate my grow pole systems and I have probably spent much less money than other types of container gardening. My favorite grow poles are the EZgro's and you can see their web site here.

http://www.theezgro.com/planter_instructions/planter_instruc...