The Winner for "2009 Best Container Vegetable Plant" is Sungold Tomato!
Best Tomatoes: Sungold and Husky Cherry Red. These cherry tomatoes had a wonderful sweet flavor and produced large quantities. Next year I need to plant them sooner to take advantage of a greater harvest at the end of the summer. Husky Cherry had some tomatoes with blossom end rot.
Brandywine only gave me about 3 tomatoes before the weather got cold, and the texture was a little mushy. The flavor was just okay. The patio and bush tomatoes produced a better harvest, but the taste and the texture were fair to poor.
Eggplant: Dusky eggplant gave me 2 very nice eggplants that were delicious. The Japanese eggplant only produced one stunted fruit. The other eggplants were not planted early enough to produce.
Peppers: California green pepper planted in the front yard was the best with 3 small peppers that tasted wonderful - crisp and flavorful. The yellow pepper never produced and the plant was diseased. The chili red and cayenne hot peppers were great with lots of peppers to harvest. The jalapeno was good and produced well for being planted late. Overall, the pepper plants stayed very small and didn't need a very big pot.
Strawberry: A huge disappointment with not a single berry produced, but the plant flourished with large green healthy leaves and a multitude of runners sent out over the deck.
Peas: Fun to grow, but didn't produce much for the space they took up on the deck. However, they were very tasty.
Carrots: These took a very long time to grow, and when harvested were small - about 1/4 of the size that I expected. They tasted quite good, but it was time consuming to clean off all the dirt.
Radishes: Fun to grow because they can be harvested so quickly, but didn't taste that great.
Lettuce: Little Gem and Buttercrunch were the best varieties and lasted for a long time because of our cool weather. They were a little bitter at times, but still delicious. I liked the head lettuce better than the cut and come again varieties.
Cucumber: Produced large quantities of crisp non-bitter small cucumbers with tender skin. They had sharp spines, but these came off easily.
Basil: Sweet basil was delicious and flourished all summer long.
Cabbages, Kohlrabi, and Bok Choy were a complete failure in the front yard, either not producing, or being eaten up by bugs. The turnip plants are still growing and may yield a good number of pretty small turnips. (Will we actually eat these?)
The pot sizes I selected were adequate for the plants for the most part, except the peppers and the cucumber did not need much root space. The tomatoes seem to take up whatever space is provided for the roots, but they did not seem root bound, except for the 4 gallon pot. The peas did not need such a large pot. The amount of sunlight and placement of the plants was good. The weather was way too cold and rainy! Luckily, the blight (if it was truly lat blight) did not kill my tomatoes possibly because of the copper that I sprayed. The plants were affected at the end of the summer with some leaves turning brown and a few stems dying off. The blight did seem to affect my Japanese eggplant and yellow pepper.
2010 Plans:
2 Sungold Tomato
4 Boston Pickling cucumber (2 plants per pot) planted in succession
1 Dusky Eggplant
2 California Green Pepper
1 Jalapeno
1 Chili Red hot pepper
Little Gem/Buttercrunch Lettuce planted in succession
Basil - 6 plants in the same container
Oregano, curly parsley, rosemary, chives, (thyme and Italian parsley should come back next year in the front yard)
Nasturtium - plant alone
New plants to try:
3 new tomato varieties
Mint
Garlic chives
New strawberry variety
Other things to think about:
Planting herbs that survive longer into fall in the same pot.
Growing ornamental kale and other plants for decorative fall pots.
Placing pots out in the yard in sunny areas to grow more vegetables.
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