Welcome to our new California garden in the month of September. We will go over the progress that we have made in our new garden, followed by some harvests we made this month and look at some cool gardening products.

Progress/Setting up our new California garden

We started off by setting up drip irrigation system for all the containers that we got from our old house. The weather was quite hot this month and we somehow could not keep up with manual watering of all the plants growing in containers, twice a day. We had all supplies from the last time we set up the drip irrigation system so were able to get the system up and running in no time. We used main lines, emitters, quarter inch tubing, and the same timer-based system we had in our previous garden to set up drip irrigation. If you see water dripping from the bottom of the container, it?s a good sign that the drips are watering your plants adequately. Alternatively, you can place a saucer under the containers to catch the water so your plants can absorb more as needed. Using worm compost/vermi-compost and/or perlite also helps greatly with moisture retention during hot days.

Emerald Okra plant and Beef Master Tomato plants were few new entrants to our container gardening this month. We are really excited to see how these take off in the coming months

Harvests

Little Prince Eggplant ? Overall it was a very productive year for this eggplant variety this year. We noticed spider mite issues due to the extremely hot temperature, so we sprayed them with natural oils and that helped curtail it.

Amethyst Eggplants -They yielded lot of amethyst colored
eggplants that were absolutely delicious in stir fry?s

Alter Ego Peppers ? A hot/sweet tasting pepper variety.

Thai Chili Peppers ? They are a hotter pepper variety which are growing in a 5-gallon container

Cayenne Peppers ? A hot pepper variety which is also a heavy
producer. This plant was over wintered from the last growing season and yielded
a lot of peppers this year

Bell peppers ? Mild pepper variety which are growing in a 5-gallon container but overall, we were not very happy with the health of this plant.

Taro Root ? We were growing these in grow bags and this plant yielded large sized taro roots and we were amazed at the size of the main root ball. We are planning to re pot the main root ball and sprout into a new plant for the next growing season.

Gardening Products

In my local Home Depot, I saw these galvanized tanks which are actually meant to hold water for livestock in farms. I was thinking these could probably makeup for a sturdy raised bed. Please share your thoughts and experiences if you have used these tanks for growing vegetables in your home garden.

Here is a video guide of how our California garden looks in the month of September ? California Garden, September 2019 Tour