Charlie-3 Gardening

My transplants have grown too big and I'd wanted to plant them long before today, but it was cooler this year than last and, on top of that, I was anxious to get the garden in because we're going on an all-summer vacation to New England and the Canadian Maritimes.

This year's garden will mostly consist of an integration of several techniques of gardening I've researched on the internet with a touch of my own ingenuity.  I've used variations of vertical gardening, container gardening, and gutter gardening.  Last year, I started with a modification of Max and Grant Buster's "global buckets" and migrated to "gutter gardening" as outlined by Larry Hall.  While doing that, I had some small trees to which I wanted to keep watered so I ran a mop string to them from the gutters and they worked great as a wick.  Over the winter, I experimented with various wicks and soil preparations.  So far, the best wick I've run across was the a rayon mop head from Wal-Mart and the best soil mixture so far seems to be a mixture similar to Ray Newstead's container soil.  I call it 22-11 mix.  It includes 2 parts peat moss, 2 parts pine bark fines, 1 part compost, and 1 part perlite.  The 22-11 mix is amended with 1 cup ag lime and 1 cup worm castings from my own worms.  I mixed and filled the buckets.  We'll see how things grow.

With the wicks, I can control the flow of water with the amount of wicks put into the gutters.  When it gets hot, I'll throw some brown and green shrubs and small trees into my shredder then toss on top of buckets as top mulch.  Anyway, that's the idea of it all and I'll document until our trip begins.

I call my new technique "Charlie-3 Gardening" or "C3 Gardening" cause my name is Charles and I'm combining 3 techniques (sorta).  It's cheesy, but it's my idea I'm sharing so I get to name it.  Here are some containers with my somewhat straggly tomatoes I put in today.  Here are the types of tomatoes I have planted:

Amana Orange, Arkansas Traveler, Aunt Ruby’s German Green, Barlow Jap, Barnes Mountain Orange, Beefsteak, Black from Tula, Blonde Boar, Brandywine (Suddith), Cherokee Purple, Chocolate Stripes, Cowlick Brandywine, Coyote, Depp’s Pink Firefly, Grandma Viney's Yellow and Pink, Dester Amish, Frank’s Large Red, German Johnson, Hege German Pink, KBX, Madison County Pink, Marlowe Charleston, Mexico Midget, Mortgage Lifter, NAR, Omar’s Lebanese, Paul Robeson, Pike County Pink, Pineapple, Purple Dog Creek, Rebecca Sebastian’s Bull Bag, Strawberry, Sun Gold, and Valencia.

Is that too many?