Welcome. this is a great group of members. you will learn alot if you stick around, and i hope you do. sorry, i am too new in oklahoma to be of much help, but others will.

Hi Danielle! My name is Danielle too and I am in north east OK. My mom called me Danni Girl since I was little and it just stuck with me. As far as gardening, my mother is a HUGE flower gardener so I grew up helping her in her flower beds but as I got older I wanted more of a veggie/free flow/cottage style garden. So my mom (with her extremely well manicured rose gardens) is not much help with my new adventure LOL! But I have found this site to be a God sent for me.

My advice is dont grow perennials that you spend alot of money on in containers unless it is a earth box (self watering). Containers and pots dry out sooo quickly it is not worth me being lazy for a few days (or extremely busy with other things) and killing something I spent an investment on trying to establish for years to come. Now that is me just being practical and knowing myself. I have a 1/4 acre garden so I dont care too much about space saving veggies, I just grow what I think might be fun to try out. But if I had to conserve space I would recommend buying the book "Square Foot Gardening". After reading this book I want to raise my whole garden, although my husband wasnt too thrilled about doing this to a 1/4 of an acre hehehe... one step at a time right?. But really look into this book and also "Carrots love Tomatoes" this will give you great ideas what can grow right beside each other, succession planting to get more from your harvest year, and will give you a good idea on what all you can squeeze into a bed. Also it will tell you what you can plant 'on top of eachother' like planting carrots at the base of your tomatoes saving room and being beneficial to each other at the same time! If I were you I would stick to plants that will give you bang for your buck like tomatoes, cucumbers (space saver variety) and salad greens. Okra will get nice and tall with alot of produce but it can get bushy and shade what is underneath it. Squash is also productive but it is bushy and takes room to grow. You can also try the "Three Sisters" which is planting corn, then planting pole beans, then a winter squash. The Corn will provide support for your pole beans to grow up and the winter squash will provide the roots shade and keep out raccoons. Just a suggestion.

Good Luck!

~Danni Girl

Danielle, You don't say how many containers you plan to have, but you have listed a lot of veggies. Even with succession planting, that's a lot for one 4x8 ft bed. You could do it though. Plant the peas (from plants in peat pots or bathroom cups if using sugarsnaps--do a search of this forum for techniques) along the trellis in the back. Then put in a row of broccoli plants down the center, leaving room for three tomato plants interspersed with them. Then a row of carrots and a row of lettuce. Cauliflower is a bit more difficult than broccoli. You might want to put it off until you get more experience.

Those are your early crops. When the peas come out, you can plant pole beans and a couple cucs along the trellis and pop in a bush type summer squash or two where the broccoli came out. I would find a place in the open ground for okra, because those plants can get 8 ft tall and 3 feet wide. Same goes for the blackberries because they are perrenials and will do better in the ground with a nice mulch. You don't say where you live but in SW Oklahoma with sandy soils and less rainfall than we get here in NE Ok, I wouldn't build too high a raised bed. There is such a thing as too much drainage.

Dawn is the queen of the containers and a veggie gardening guru. I'm sure she will be along with some good advice and varieties.

Thanks for the advice! I know the list is long, but those are just the options as far as what our family actually eats. I hadn't/haven't decided for sure what we will limit it to :) Our soil here is actually not sandy at all... very much gross clay. And we rent, so actually putting things into the ground is not really an option yet unfortunately :-/. So I guess not okra or blackberries.

Danielle,

First, welcome to the forum. It is always so exciting to have new members post and introduce themselves.

Secondly, I don't think it is laughable that you tried planting first before finding the forum and figuring out that soil improvement would give you better results. Every one of us was new at some point in time, and every one of us can look back at things we did as newbies that either horrify us or make us laugh now...but we just didn't know better back then.

Strawberries are high-maintenance as they are very disease-prone. They also are very attractive to every creature on the earth, including sow bugs and pill bugs, birds, mice, squirrels, etc., so you have to fight all those creatures for every ripe strawberry. Thus, I'd recommend you get a couple of years of experience in growing other plants before you try strawberries.

You've already learned that blackberries need lots of space and cannot be easily grown in containers, but you can grow dwarf forms of okra in containers easily....I grow them in kitty litter buckets (with holes drilled in the bottom for drainage) that hold about 4 to 5 gallons of soil or in 5-gallon buckets. (If you paint the kitty litter buckets with Krylon Fusion spray paint, they look really nice and no one will know they once were kitty litter buckets.) My favorite dwarf okras are 'Little Lucy' and 'Baby Bubba'. Both grow fine in containers and both are highly ornamental. I've linked a photo of Little Lucy (available from Park Seed and other places) for you below---just look how pretty it is (it is sold out there but likely available elsewhere). If you have flower beds, you can 'sneak' Little Lucy and Baby Bubba into them.

Of the vegetables you listed that y'all like and want to grow, these are cool season crops that need to be planted fairly soon: broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, peas (assuming you mean snow peas, edible podded peas or English peas and not southern peas like black-eye, cream, zipper, crowder or purple hull) and carrots. All these cool-season plants are short-season plants here, making most of their growth from late winter through late spring and mostly being harvested before the real summer heat arrives in June. I'd plant the peas on the trellis and wouldn't plant either broccoli or cauliflower if I only had one raised bed because the plants take up huge amounts of room.

Instead, I'd put the peas on the trellis as a cool-season crop. I'd yank them out when the heat stops production and you've harvested all the peas you're going to get, and then I'd plant pole beans and a couple of cucumber plants in their place. I'd plant two tomato plants...one that produces heavy loads of slicing types (Goliath, Better Boy, Celebrity, Whopper or Early Girl all produce very well here) and one that produces heavy loads of cherry types (Grape, Sweet Million, Sweet 100, Sungold, Black Cherry or Yellow Pear. I put Yellow Pear on the list because it has mild flavor and kids love it.

I'd put the squash plant at one end of the bed where it can hang over the edge because it is a space hog.

Once the carrots and lettuce are harvested, you can put bush beans or something else in their place as a summer crop. Lettuce will die out early in southwestern OK because of your heat.

Anything that you can grow in the ground can also be grown in containers, but it costs a lot of money to fill up containers with a well-draining soil-less mix (never put native soil in containers) so I reserve containers for veggies that give me a lot of produce relative to the amount of space used/soil needed to fill the container. It wouldn't, for example, be cost-effective to try to grow broccoli in a container because you could buy a lot of broccoli at the grocery store for what you'd spend for the soil-less mix to fill one container to plant one plant and get one big brocoli head and maybe a few sideshoots. I normally use containers for tomatoes, peppers (sweet and hot), dwarf okra and sometimes cucumbers. Containers are marvelous for herbs and you can put several kinds of herbs in one container. It is very cost effective to grow your own herbs because you can get a summer-long crop from, say, basil and purchasing one plant that you can harvest leaves from for months would cost about the same as buying a tiny package of about 6 or 8 basil leaves at the grocery store.

Since you'll be gardening with kids, it might be fun to grow things that are unexpected colors....yellow or orange tomatoes, purple or yellow green beans, purple yellow or white carrots, red or red-and-green speckled lettuce, red okra, etc. Our son always liked for me to grow lemon cucumbers when he was little...just for the uniqueness of having yellow cukes.

Dawn

Here is a link that might be useful: Little Lucy

What great info! That really helps me get down to the specifics. Thank you so much, Dawn. So, is it too late to start from seed for the cool season plants? Should I just buy the plants from the store?

Danielle,

It depends on what cool-season crop you're talking about.

With peas, you could start them now indoors or on a sheltered sun porch like Dorothy does and transplant them out in a couple of weeks. Peas can be very slow to sprout in cold soil, but need to grow in fairly cool conditions and that is why some of us start them indoors and then transplant them pretty quickly. Peas don't really like to be transplanted, so I use plantable pots in an effort to keep them happy.

Broccoli and Cauliflower probably still could be started inside now and trasplanted out in about 3 or 4 weeks, or you can buy transplants and set them out in the garden once your nights are staying above 25 degrees consistently.

Lettuce could be direct sown now, and so could carrots. The carrots will be a little slower to germinate in cold soil but there's really no way to get around that.

As far as buying transplants versus direct-sowing, if this is your first year to garden, I'd buy transplants of broccoli and cauliflower, and direct sow everything else except the peas, which I'd start in cups. If you don't have a grow light setup for starting seeds, it likely wouldn't be worth setting one up this late in the year for only a few plants. You can start peas inside without lights, but you just keep them inside until the peas start sprouting....you're using the house's warmer conditions to get them to sprout. The minute the first ones sprout, you move them all outside. Otherwise, the early sprouters will get tall and leggy stretching to find light while you wait for the slower ones to sprout. Wait until they've all sprouted, and then transplant them into the ground. I try to get them in the ground while they're still just a couple of inches tall.

I'd also just buy tomato and pepper transplants when the appropriate planting time rolls around, and direct seed the other warm-season crops.

Vegetable gardening can be very complex in terms of getting all the plants into the ground at the best time to ensure that (a) they don't freeze during a late frost/freeze and yet, (b) still get them into the ground so they can make good growth before the summer heat arrives. That's a tough assignment right there for a new gardener, so I'd suggest getting a year of gardening experience first, and then starting from seed either for the fall garden or next year's garden. Starting from seed indoors can be very stressful when you're new at it, so if planting a garden is entirely new to you, I'd just worry about planting stuff during your freshman year as a gardener, and maybe make growing seeds indoors under lights a project for your sophomore gardening year.

Dawn

Thank you so very much :) Off to go garden shopping now!

Thanks...the info was helpful to me too!
Cindy

Y'all are welcome.

I know it is a lot to remember and keep straight....just remember that gardening is supposed to be fun, relaxing, and enjoyable too, so don't sweat the small stuff and remember that....it's all small stuff.

Dawn