Garden

In 2025, we put in a small vegetable garden on our porch using totes. We watched a couple YouTube videos on how to prepare the totes:

Preparing Totes for Growing Food by Carib Sunsations
Raised Bed in a Tote by James Prigioni The summary is: use 5P plastic, drill half-inch drainage holes, fill with sticks and junk, add compost and soil. I am curious to see how this style of container gardening works out.

Making Tote Garden Boxes #

The Initial Setup #

The photo shows from left to right: some tomatoes, watermelons, and corn. In the front row, we have a basil plant, mint, and strawberry waiting to be planted.

Geraniums #

At the garden store, Mira really wanted to pick out some pretty flowers. We got these lovely pink geraniums. We immediately potted them up to much larger pots.

UTSC Garden Club #

This year, we got a plot at the UTSC Garden Club. Here are a couple of shots of the garden. First, here is the walk in:

And then here are some shots of our plot (allotment).

The plot is quite bit, roughly fiteen by thirty feet. It will need significant work to clean it up. The plan is to put in some low-maintenance stuff: wildflowers, beets, carrots, tomatoes.

Seeds for 2025 #

I got a number of seeds at the TBG Spring Sale 2025

Name	Timing	Sowing
Nasturtium	1 week after last frost	direct / 1cm deep / 20-25cm apart
Mesclun Salad	early spring[^mustard]	3mm deep, 25 seeds per 20cm
Beneficial Insect Wildflowers	early spring	direct
Butterfly Wildflowers	early spring	direct
Sunflower	mid spring	direct: 2cm deep / 30cm apart
Beets	late spring	1cm deep / 10cm apart / every 2-3 weeks
Radishes	whenever	5mm deep / 25 seeds per 20cm
Jalapeno	5-8 weeks before last frost
Marigolds	6-8 weeks before last frost

First Harvest #

While clearing out the garden plot of weeds, I collected up the “first harvest” of the new garden: a bunch of green onions. The kids enjoyed munching on them.

2021 #

Plants

We bought a geranium, two tomatoe plants, an edamame plant, and a watermelon. We picked up these plants from Ian at We Got Plants.

Published: May 17, 2021 @ 12:13.
Last Modified: May 15, 2025 @ 20:35.

Tags:

#plants #garden