Container Vegetable Gardening

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Comment by Yvonne Savio on August 12, 2009 at 7:00pm

How 'bout just plain old organic matter as mulch? It's readily available in many forms, and decomposes into the soil to enrich it!

Comment by chris w on May 24, 2009 at 12:17am

Prabhat, I forgot something very basic. It is such a part of what I do I don't think about it. Remember to mulch your containers. Almost everything I plant is mulched. Your hasion cloth (Hessian/Burlap) remnants would be perfect. You should use at least two layers and cover the dirt in your containers with it. I try to keep the sun from hitting my dirt as much as possible. So my plants get two kinds of shade, the dirt has full time permanent shade, and the tomato plants get part time shade. There are also soil additives you can buy that will help your dirt keep moisture. Those also help alot. Sorry for having to add on to my earlier post.

Comment by Pema on May 22, 2009 at 1:31pm

Chris, Mahalo (thank you) for the link to the tomato growers supply web page. Amazing! Never saw so many different kinds and colors. Eager to see what will grow well in my Maui, Hawaii, small backyard garden.

Comment by chris w on May 22, 2009 at 7:42am

Hi, Prabhat - I have been wondering about your tomatoes and waiting to hear how they are doing. 50 c is 122 f, where I live we have about a week of temps between 46.6 c (116 f) and 48 c (120) each year with similar but slightly lower temps for about a month at least. I looked up your city and our climates are similar in the summer (mine is much colder in the winter).

I plant my tomatoes in large containers (nothing small) because small containers dry out too fast. I know that 'large' is vague, so when I say large, I mean all my pots are bigger than what I can wrap my arms around (hug). All my plants get at least a little shade - I follow the guideline that 'full sun' only means 8 to 10 hours of full sun. We have really long days here, up to 17 hours of light in the hottest part of the year so some shade is good.

I believe you will have to provide your tomatoes with permanent shade set up so that as the sun rotates during the day they will get shade at least at the end of the day and when it is hottest outside, maybe the whole day.

Some tomatoes are more heat tolerant than others, this web page has many varieties available (towards the bottom)
http://www.tomatogrowers.com/midseason3.htm

You might be able to take other steps to change the 'microclimate' on your roof, like spraying the roof surface with water to cool the surface. That will make a big difference. According to the internet you all are 'semi arid'. My climate is arid, and we use water to get cool all the time.

The internet says your winter average low is 15 c (59 f) so you might want to grow tomatoes August through March and not April to July. We can't grow tomatoes October through April due to weather, so it might be just that you picked the wrong time of the year for your climate to start your tomatoes.

To save your current tomatoes, you might want to put them on casters to roll the pots around and roll them into permanent shade for the hot part of the day. My plants get deep shade, so something stronger than the hasion (my research says hasion is most likely what we call burlap) cloth would be fine.

Sorry such a long reply - but I think the idea of gardening after your hottest part of the year is the best idea at least until you have a little more experience.

Comment by prabhat choudhary on May 22, 2009 at 1:03am

in jaipur india direct sun rays temp is 50 . cel all plants are burnt morn/eve both time water providing some plants shifted in shadow they are still live temporary hasion shadow torn with fast airflow now what to do

Comment by Michelle W. Flannery on April 29, 2009 at 9:10am

Hi Mary. You should visit the group Backyard Kitchen Herbalist. Katherine Turcotte is our local specialist in herbs (in my opinion). There's much good information in that group.

Comment by Mary on April 29, 2009 at 7:23am

I have been growing herbs in containers on my patio for the past 3-4 years. Would love to know what I could be doing to get better at this - as well as ideas...

Comment by Joy Williams on April 8, 2009 at 5:20pm

Well, Chris he's in India, so it probably stays a consistent 100+ degrees in the summer. They really need to go in the ground if he can swing it. I don't know what color his pots are, but if they are the black plastic ones, the plants could very well be cooked. :(

Comment by chris w on March 18, 2009 at 5:34pm

I wonder if Prabhat could have his tomatoes in a bigger pot with shade OK. We have temps at 104 or higher for about a month or more in the summer and I still have tomato plants be OK in containers. I give them some shade so they are not in the sun all the time, and I like to have larger containers (nothing small). Our hottest weather is 115 (and over every once in awhile) for about two weeks in mid-july. That's about 46c. Sure wish we could just go there and help!

Comment by Joy Williams on March 17, 2009 at 10:55pm

Prabhat I have no idea what either of those are. Find a shade cloth that will bring the temp down in the pots. As it stands now though, the roots may actually be cooked. I think you need to ramp this down with the temps you get, and put these tomato plants IN THE GROUND. I don't think your environment will allow tomatoes to thrive in containers. It gets WAY too hot there. You should probably start your tomatoes in the late fall. As religious as you are about watering, the soil sounds like it's getting too hot in containers. No amount of watering will dissipate that enough.

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