3rd Weekend Gardening: Okras have sprouted. Re-potted most seedlings.

Well, it's been the 3rd weekend since I decided to get serious on my new little hobby. The 1st weekend, I had just used some of the soil by the driveway (big mistake), and some of my mother's old planters to kickstart my vegetable container garden. Using 4 small planters, I planted some lettuce, tomato, cherry tomato and chilli seeds. After 1 week of watering and waiting, I was pleasantly surprised that the tomato, cherry tomato, and chillis seeds have sprouted.
This is how crowded the chilli planter looks, since I was just randomly sowing the seeds around the planter without any proper planning. Adele especially like these chilli plants since she was the one who been watering and weeding this planter. So, she had happily taken ownership of this planter once the seeds started to sprout.

I was quite happy for my cherry tomato plant, since I just threw a couple of supermarket cherry tomatoes, that have begun to dry up in the fridge, into the planter. It was just a test to see if any would even sprout given the condition of the seeds and poor soil used. Seeing I managed to get 1 plant out of 8 buried tomatoes, this cherry tomato plant is a survivor and one tough fighter. However, the weeds were starting to grow in the cherry tomato planter and will soon be a problem.

Since the small planters was showing such good results, I bought two additional bigger pots with some decent potting mix to plant some okra and carrots seeds on the 2nd weekend. By the 3rd weekend, the okra seeds have also have sprouted.

Too bad, the carrot and lettuce doesn't seems to show any of sign of life. On the bright side, the rest of the seedlings continue to grow new healthy green leaves which are encouraging to beginners like me and Adele. So, this past weekend (3rd) we went out to get additional containers, potting mix, vermiculites and compost  to re-pot the young seedlings to encourage healthy plant growth.

I also went to our local Starbuck to grab a free bag of ground coffee to give our plants a little "extra" boost. Ground coffee, which is rich in nitrogen, will do nicely as a soil amendment. 

This round, I was looking for a specific type of container as I wanted to try setting up the container version of the "Square Foot Gardening" that I've been reading about for the past few weeks. Driving around KL and Puchong gardening centers, it was kinda like a treasure hunt to find the 1ft x 1ft x 1ft containers that I wanted. Most center usually have the circular type pots in stock but I was lucky enough to find one that actually have the square container type. 

These containers were kind of pricey since they are the "self-watering" type.Oh well, I can use it to plant my water thirsty tomato plants, which is exactly what I did. This also solve my tomato's "weed problem" since I'm using potting mix (weed free) in the new pot, which have much better water drainage and rich in compost material.

I transplanted one of the okra seedlings to the second square pot. I will be thinking about staking the plant if it manage to show sign it survive the transplant in the following weekend.

Since Adele was asking me to give her chilli plants a new home, I re-potted two of the young plants into 2 medium size ceramic pots that was laying around (courtesy of my mom's previous gardening activity). One mistake we would discover much later in the week, was that putting small stones inside and at the bottom of the pots, was really not a good idea. The plants nearly "drown" from our watering, when the stones ended up blocking the pot drainage hole. I managed to free up the blockage in time and the plants recovered. But since there are still some of the stones in the pot, I would probably have to re-pot these plants again in the near future.

This is how my container vegetable garden looks like by the 3rd weekend. A small start for us, but Adele and I had fun setting the things up and watching the plant grows.