Thanks Jen Rick

OK, y'all, this thread is so active I can hardy keep up, but I am going to try. Melissa, We are so glad you stumbled across this forum too. Containers are a great way to garden but they do require very careful attention to watering. Also, the soilless mix to fill them is expensive (often, when filling up my containers, I mix up my own soilless mix for far less than I'd spend buying a name brand soil-less mix/potting soil). The size/productivity of your plants is limited by the size of your container so for most things, the larger the container, the better. Also, during periods of hotter weather, containers may need to be watered daily and in the hottest 100-degree-plus weather, perhaps twice a day. The easiest way is to hook up a drip irrigation system and put it on a timer, especially if you are away from home a lot. Container gardening could be a whole thread in itself. I'll start a container gardening thread today or tomorrow and try to lay out some of the basics. Containers do not have to be fancy containers though....I use Tidy Cat litter buckets, which I have saved and used the whole decade-plus that we've lived here, and I spray paint them dark green using Fusion paint made especially for painting plastics. I also use Sunleaves grow bags. With clay soil, it takes years of constant amending to get it into really good shape. In the past I have only expanded my garden a little at a time....by adding an area maybe 40 to 60 feet long by 5 to 6 feet wide. Gumbo clay needs all the help it can get but it can be turned into great soil over a period of time. Our formerly red clay in the garden area is now a nice brown clayey loam because we've added organic matter to it for ten years, so I finally feel ready to start another garden spot....in three different places. However, they all will get fairly minimal improvement this winter (because I'm going to be working on 3 fairly large areas at once) and then every year I'll improve them more until they finally have pretty good soil. With clay the issue is that the particles of soil stick together and the prevents water from soaking in as well as it should, it also ensures that when the soil dries it is as hard and impenetrable as concrete so water just rolls off the surface and doesn't soak in, and it makes it hard for plant roots to grow. Technically, plant roots do not grow in soil. Rather, they grow in the air spaces between soil particles. Clay soil particles clump together so tightly that there are no air spaces for roots to grow in, and that's why we have to add tons of organic matter....to break up the particles of gumbo clay. The reason raised beds work so well with clay is that they put your plant roots in improved soil above the regular grade of the surrounding area. That allows water to drain down out of the beds to a certain extent. When 12.4 inches of rain fell here at our house in one day last year, I expected to lose my entire garden. You cannot expect ANY vegetable plant to survive that kind of flooding rainfall in clay soil. What did I lose? Only some onions and potatoes and a few corn plants that were not in a raised bed. Had I not had raised beds, I would have lost everything. George, We get more of the bermuda grass out by hand tools too, but in certain areas the ground is so clayey that we have to break it first with a tiller. When we do that, I rake out/remove by hand all the grass runners and stolons I can afterward, but it is hard to get a lot of it because it has been chopped into tiny pieces. Eventually, over several years time, I mostly win the bermuda war. Melissa, For hand tools, buy the absolute highest quality tools you can find and you'll never regret it. A high quality hand tool is a thing of beauty! Jay, I have bindweed in two places here and despite everything I do, it seems impossible to erradicate. Some years it isn't as bad, and this was one of those years....or maybe I am gradually winning the war. I hate bindweed as much as I hate bermuda grass and Johnson grass. Carol, I love containers and have found them to be lifesavers in very wet years like 2007. None of the plants I have in containers come close to approaching the size/productivity those same varieties achieve in the ground, but they do well enough to satisfy me. This year, there were several tomatoes that produced exceptionally well in feed tubs....including Chocolate Stripes, Momotaro and Scarlet Red. I wish I had 100 more feed tubs (I only have six). Y'all, I have to agree that no one looks the way I pictured them but.....I am going to stay on everybody's good side by saying that every person I met at the swap that I had not met before was younger, thinner and prettier than I had imagined. The one thing I already knew though was that every one one of them had a big heart of gold beating there in their chest and that was confirmed when I met them. Dawn

Well, Dawn, I think that is the best kind of co-op ever! I need to start getting out more and building some kind of a network like that. About all I have in excess is fresh lettuce. If I give away anything else from the garden, I have less to can and that translates to me having to buy it from the grocery store before the next growing season. But I'm going to put my thinking cap on. I did just recently find a source for wood mulch through the fellow who cut down a tree for us, and our "bug man" has a herd of cattle so he's offered cow manure. Every time he comes I send him away with a few of whatever I have at the moment. Once he got some Candy onions and was really wowwed. Another time it was a small bag of sweet potatoes. If I don't have something just out of the garden, I'll often have cookies made or something else I can share with him, in addition to his monthly service call payment. I've done a little more checking into the co-op and I'm not quite as excited about it now as I was. Most of the things offered are quite a bit more expensive than what I consider to be normal. Now, I know that when you buy ham or beef at the grocery store they inject a certain amount of water so it weighs more. And the meat in the co-op is certified organic. But still... About the only things that I have seen on the co-op so far that I would consider to be good buys are pecans for $7 a pound, wheat berries for $13 a tub and pork fat (if I wanted to render it into lard, which I'm not sure I do) for $2.25 a pound. Plus there's sales tax, and an additional 8 percent shipping and handling charge. And of course there's that $51.75 membership fee. So if that's all I'm going to buy I'm just not sure it would be worth it.

That is a sweet thing you did for your daughter. It must be hard to give up (for you, I mean). I hope you have a picture of the two of you in it! Now I'm going to have the Thinking Chair song in my head all evening. :)