I have seen somewhere before about growing pumpkins in kiddie pools on roof tops. I think that should work just fine, put a post on craigslist you are wanting old hard plastic shallow kiddie pools. I know come spring people will find those dirty pools they left out back thinking they would use them again. People are too lazy to clean them and they toss them. In almost all of our rental houses we find kiddie pools after people move out.

I have a small blue one right now, the ones where you blow the top ring up. It would make a great spud patch on top of a cement pad (if someone wanted to put a truck load of dirt in it)!

Ilene,

I generally don't do succession planting the same way every year, so that's not necessarily a routine way that I do it. However, when I can, I try to plant heavy feeders in an area previously occupied by a heavy giver or vice versa as the case may be.

I don't plant lettuce in a dedicated bed. I usually interplant it with something else, often tomatoes and carrots. The carrots are mostly occupying the deeper soil under the surface and the lettuce occupies some of the soil for the roots but the plants themselves occupy the air space betwee the carrots. Sometimes I get really adventurous and interplant carrots and lettuce both underneath tomato plants. Both the carrots and lettuce are finished fairly early compared to the tomato plants, but while they are in the ground, they're shading it and keeping it cool.

I don't know if my memory is good enough to remember what plants succeeded others last year, but I know that when the broccoli came out in early June, the purplehull pinkeye peas went in. When the onions came out in June, more purplehulls and also some fall tomatoes went into their space.

In Corn Bed #1, which grew Texas Honey June, the succession crop was pumpkins and winter squash. The companion plants for the corn was beans on the fence east of the corn and zukes and crookneck squash at each corner of the corn bed. With the pumpkins and winter squash, I squeezed in a double row of bush beans (Royalty Purple Pod, I think, or maybe the one that has Burgundy in its name) on the western edge of the pumpkin bed, and then I kept trying to train the pumpkins to grow every which way except towards the bush beans, and was more or less successful with that.

When the early potatoes came out in late June or early July, I planted green bush beans in one bed and fall melons in the other....not as any part of a grand scheme but merely because I needed a place for more beans. When a row of tomato plants came out of their bed in late July because they were tired and affected by Septoria Leaf Spot, fall cukes went into most of that bed along with a coupe of fall tomato plants.

When the cabbage and early melons were harvested in late July, fall Irish potatoes went into that bed, although I left the sage there on the western edge of that be.

When the later corn crop (Country Gentleman) was finished in July, I planted Marvel of Venice pole yellow roma-type beans on one side of that bed and two varieties of cowpeas on the other half.

See, there's not necessarily any rhyme or reason. I don't have a highly regimented, well-planned rotation schedule or succession planting schedule. Basically I do my first planting and then I ask myself, "What am I going to put there in the month of _____ when that planting is done?" and the answers alway present themselves.

So, make a list of the crops you want to grow that are not in your spring bed and figure out where you could put them. If you'll tell me what you want to succession plant, I can tell you how far in advance of the plant-out date to start seedlings if you're going to start seedlings indoors. I almost always start my succession plants in paper cups with the bottoms cut out about 3 weeks before the time I expect to plant them. That allows me to harvest whatever and yank out the plants and then put in replacements immediately.

To tell you the truth, often I start succession plantings in paper cups with absolutely no idea of what I will do with them when they are ready to go into the ground. I figure I'll come up with something as planting time nears, and it always does.

I haven't tried onions in a container except when growing them for use as green onions, but I suppose it could be done as long as the pool has lots and lots of drainage holes in it. Onions won't do well if their soil stays too wet. I try to make sure my onions get 1" of raifall or irrigation or any combination thereof weekly.

You can plant pumpkins in a kiddie pool with lots of drainage holes, but you'll need to put in a good, rich soilless planting medium that drains well and also be prepared to water often. I'd plant a bush or semi-bush type like Cheyenne bush pumpkin or Orange Smoothie if I was growing pumpkins in a container, or one of the smallest decorative ones like Jack-B-Little or Baby Boo or Wee-B-Little or Batwing. Those last four can be trellised and grown vertically which means you could squeeze more plants into that space.

Sometimes, too, when planning succession plantings (to the extent that I plan at all) I have to base my choices on what will work with the weather we're having. There's no point in planting corn in mid-June, for example, because it will be pollinating in high heat and tip fill will be poor and, if it is hot enough, the corn won't pollinate enough to be usable. I can plant corn in mid- to late-July and then cross my fingers and hope for cool enough fall weather that I'll get good ears.

This year's succession plants mostly were panic plantings. For example, I never even got early beans in the ground because the soil was too wet, so I planted lots of succession bean crops in various beds to make up for not having an early spring crop. I planted fall cukes because the spring ones didn't get enough to make all the pickles I wanted. So, if I had a rigid planting plan, I'd lose the flexibility to do panic plantings to make up for whatever failed to give me a good harvest.

Dawn

I always feel like I waste so much space with tomatoes. Maybe I will plant some smaller things around them this year. It sounds like it should work.

Woman, bite your tongue! How can you waste space with tomatoes? They are so worth the space they occupy! LOL

The space required between them is one reason I interplant a lot of smaller stuff between them and around them. It ought to work for you too. I also plant them closer than I should--last year's 3' spacing worked out pretty well, but some years I have planted them only 18-24" apart. I get fewer tomatoes per plant when they are that close, but more fruit overall because there's more plants. I'd like to plant them 4' apart for better air circulatoin, but then I'd have to plant significantly fewer plants, and y'all know that just isn't going to happen.

Ah-ha, I offended the tomato queen. I like tomatoes and peppers better than any other thing in the garden, I guess, but I was referring to the first two months of growth. LOL

I plant at 3 feet. I have never thought that air circulation was a problem in Oklahoma. My tomato plants didn't get very big and bushy last year. It seemed they just got tall instead. I think they needed a little more feeding.

I need to sit down and list all of the tomato seed I have and then go over every description so that I can sort out the smaller plants for my shorter cages so I can plant the larger plants in the big cages. I think I will plant Tess's Land Race on my cattle panel arch. I usually plant tomatoes on two horizontal cattle panels, but I think I am going to buy a few more this year and add a couple more for tomatoes. I have a lot of those el-cheapo cages from the big box stores, that aren't worth bring home but I use them for peppers, and they are adequate for that. The first year that I planted here, I didn't realize that the peppers would get so heavy that they would pull themselves out of the ground. I think I was used to clay, not good soil. HeeHee I had planted them really close so when they started tipping over and I had to cage them, I could barely get in there to pick them and I had oodles that year.

I have so many things that can be grown vertically, that I really need some more structures. Crowd, crowd, crowd, that is the name of the game.

OK, that helps. I've got my garden area gridded up on an excel spreadsheet and I have it printed off along with a list of the seeds I have so I'll start there.

Not sure I want to buy more seed just because I need to have something to plant in that kiddie pool. maybe I ought to fill it with something safe, like flowers, so that if it doesn't work out I haven't lost something we could've eaten. Maybe herbs though. I wonder if dill would grow good in there?

I was really tempted by that pocket melon but I opted for Collective Farm Woman instead, only because I didn't want to use my climbing space on something that wasn't "good eatin'"

Last year, I planted herbs -- dill, fennel and basil -- between the rows of tomato plants. But the tomato plants shaded everythng out. And I planted cukes on the fence behind the sunchokes but most of the cukes formed on my neighbor's side of the fence, which made harvesting real difficult, and the sunchokes ended up choking out the cukes. So this year I think I'll plant my cukes in a row down the center of the ground-level bed that I normally use for something like okra. By fall I found myself with lots of empty places in the garden and it was too late to really plant seeds of anything in their place. But if I had had something already planted and the size to transplant, I wouldn't have had that problem. I'm having a lot of trouble with the timing of things.

I'll post again after I've figured out everything that I want to plant and maybe then we can go from there. I saved a "planting dates" list you posted late last summer, I'll hunt that up too.

Y'all have a really great Christmas and stay warm and safe. It's sleeting here today, and cold. Cars are going down the street kinda careful. Supposed to snow tomorrow.

Carol,

I wasn't offended. (giggling) I was just wondering if you had lost your mind, that's all.

With our intermittently high humidity, air circulation is a big issue a times and a non-issue at other times.

The most gorgeous tomato plants I've ever seen were planted about 8' from one another. The 'bed' was about 30' long and and 15' wide and all he had in it was 3 perfect tomato plants. Clearly, with spacing like that, nothing was competing with the plants for nutrition either.

Last year, I didn't cage the peppers. I just staked them to 3' tall wooden stakes and they rewarded me by breaking entire limbs. Next year I'll be sure to cage them again.

Ilene, I bet dill would grow in a pool. I've never noticed that it is especially deep-rooted.

We're having a blizzard here, and this may be the first and only blizzard we ever have here. The snow poked around and fell lazily...you know, a little here, a little there, for hours. Now it is pouring down hard.

Just think how good all the moisture will be for the ground and the plants.

Dawn