Plants on the brain

Despite the serious dumping of snow we received this past weekend, I'm already starting to feel the coming of spring. For example, last night it was 9:30 before I noticed that I hadn't turned the heat back up to 70F when I got home from work (I always turn it down to 65 before I leave for work). I eventually turned it up so that I wouldn't freeze in bed: Queen sized bed + 1 person sleeping alone = cold nights. I can stand waiting for the bus in the morning without loosing feeling in my smaller appendages and walking from a warm doorway to a cold car seems like less of an Arctic expedition. All in all, the warm weather is coming.

With the tiny but noticeable changes in the weather, my thoughts inevitably turn to my annual attempts to maintain a garden that doesn't shrivel up and die by mid-June. I've decided to keep it simple this year by starting out with only one crop: tomatoes. I'm not a huge fan of eating tomatoes by themselves, but I do like a lot of things that tomatoes go into, like beef stew that uses tomato paste, spaghetti sauce, and, of course, ketchup. Plus, back when I actually had a back yard, tomatoes were always the vegetable that managed to grow, even when we had a drought and all other plants had scummed.

I've isolated that my main obstacle to green-thumbed success is my inability to regularly water the outdoor plants during the peak of the summer when my job is at its busiest and I'm at my most stressed-out. Of course, that is the time of year when they most need regular watering, especially since my balcony is South-facing, so this usually ends in disaster. To prevent that from happening this year I'm currently devising a self-watering plant container out of plastic popcorn buckets from the movie theatre (Mr. Broccoli has a serious thing for popcorn and a large bucket of the stuff - covered in powdered flavoring - is considered a requirement for any movie outing, so we have about a dozen). I'll post pictures of the construction when I can realistically start to make it (i.e. when there's no more snow on the balcony). Until then, viva spring!

Edited to add: I've found a few Instructables on how to make self-watering planters. I plan to use bits and pieces from each one. There are two methods of using a plastic bottle or milk jug that would be a great seed starter or herb container, there's a much larger one for multiple plants using a Rubbermade container. Apparently you can buy premade planters call Earth Boxes that are self-watering, but there is always someone out there who wants to try and make it themselves. This is closer to what I have in mind with the popcorn buckets. Here's a good one on general organic gardening. It's meant for large-space in the ground gardening, but there are some good resources. This is a great one for adding a self-watering bottle into a unmodified planter. (These links are for anyone interested in this DIY project, as well as for myself to get back to later.)