Gutter Gardens - One month later

It's been a month since I planted my experimental gutter gardens, and I gotta say I am pretty pleased.

My first strawberry, yahoo!

My Honeoye plants are doing much better than my Eversweet, I am not sure if it is because they are not as hardy or if it is because they are above my head and may be a little neglected.  I lost about 6 of them and have since started to pay better attention to the top row.
If you compare my pictures from my first blog you can really see how much they have grown.

My radishes, carrots, and spinach are doing great also, my little green onions are having some issues, but I realized I had forgotten to drill holes in the bottom of the gutter for draining so I may have over watered, I have a few, but think I will re plant tomorrow.

Spinach

carrots

Radishes

Keeping my fingers crossed, and the warm weather continues, I think I might just have my first successful gutter garden!
                                         
                                                     

Blossoms and Museums

First Strawberry blossom of the year!!  They say I should pinch the blossoms off till June first, but the thought of doing that makes me want to cry.  So this little blossom is safe.  The next 4 days are supposed to be rainy and cloudy so no fun out in the yard, this little bloom will have to keep me content.


I missed a photo opportunity today with one of my daughter in laws, dang it!  She needed to go the 'Beauty and Belief -Crossing Bridges with the Arts of Islamic Culture' exhibit that is being featured at BYU...for one of her classes, so she invited me to come with.

 It was a fantastic display, it has 270 objects, it's basically a walk through of Islamic visual culture from the seventh century onward
Beautiful prayer rugs, jewelry, scrolls of poetry, we were on a tight schedule but got through it all in a couple hours.
Now if I was in my bloggin mind I would have had someone take our picture in front of the Museum of Art, but i wasn't so you'll just have to believe me.  If you get a chance it's worth heading down to take a look, added bonus, it's free.

Gutter Gardening

I saw a clever idea on Pinterest called 'gutter gardening' and decided to give it a try. We have a small garden on the side of our house, I wanted a larger one and this seemed like the perfect solution.

We bought 8 metal gutters attached them to our fence, drilled holes every few inches in the bottom so they would drain well, and added Miracle Grow, and planted 100 strawberry plants in  (4) 10 foot long metal gutters. 

I ordered 50 Honeyoe June bearing Strawberries and 50 Eversweet Strawberries.
I planted the Honeyoye on March 17, they are looking really healthy as of today.

 My EverSweet I planted today. 

 I put them on the fence that gets sunlight most of the day.

I also planted some dwarf carrots and spinach, I will get the  radishes, green onions, and some herbs planted this week.

If this works I have really doubled my gardening space.  

The cost of this project -  the gutters were about $6 a piece, and you need the end pieces, I think they were about a $1.20 each, but it was the brackets that were really pricey about $12 for 4.  I put 5 brackets on each gutter this may have been a bit over kill but the weekend we planted the first group of strawberries we had a snow storm and I had about 6 inches of snow sitting on top of my gutter, and they didn't budge. I also bought (2) 50 pound bags of Miracle Grow.

This weekend I am hoping to get my other garden rota-tilled. Hopefully all this work will amount to lots of veggies and fruit this summer.