Lord Darwath's Super Late 2017 Garden

As the title suggests, most of my garden was put in much later than it should have been, but right now I'm fairly well caught up to where I should be as far as doing stuff.

First, some experiments that started months ago...

Bucket o' mint:

This started out a couple years ago as an attempt (unsuccessful) at keeping ants out of my strawberry patch. Knowing that mint is a very aggressive spreader, and hard to get rid of once established, I set several small mint plants in the ground in plastic pots to contain them. Apparently mint does not like to be contained as all but two of them died. The survivors only managed to do so because they escaped their pots by setting roots out of stems that touched the ground. I gave up on the strawberries that year due to low yields, reduced even further by insect predation, and mowed them after removing (I thought) the escaped mint.

Last year I skipped the in-ground garden and did some small experiments with straw bale gardening and diy earth buckets. I noticed some of the mowed strawberry plants had come back, so figured I'd try them in the straw bale along with potatoes. I also found one small mint shoot that I hadn't gotten the previous year. It obviously had to come out, but why not put it in the bale as well, since it would be contained there? Well, that mint was the only thing that actually did well in the bale. So when last year's growing season was done I transplanted that mint into a grow bucket vacated by a mini pepper plant (the mini sweet peppers did very well in buckets, especially after the potatoes played out early so I sank the buckets in the bale to keep the soil cooler.) When I transplanted it, the mint was much larger than it had started, but fading. The straw bale just didn't provide enough nutrients to support the mint's ever-spreading growth habit. As you can see, it took very well to the bucket and has been in there since late last fall. It spent the winter indoors in a window ledge. I do think though that it is getting root bound in the 5 gallon bucket as it is very thirsty and takes very little time to display distress when the bottom reservoir empties.

Ok, I've already gotten long winded, so I'll split this up into multiple posts

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Lord Darwath's Super Late 2017 Garden