Tuesday, February 14, 2012

GARDEN REPORT - Garden #2 is Ready!

by Robin

I thought I had been keeping the blog up-to-date on my progress but I guess I did that over at Facebook instead. So, here is a quick glance, mostly with pictures, at what's been going on the past couple weeks. I had planned on taking the whole month of February to prepare ground & install the drip irrigation but spring looks like it will be very early for us and so I'd like to take advantage of that time and get seeds in the ground sooner.

Andrew and I installed the irrigation lines one afternoon that he finished up school quickly. Another day, we disassembled an old chicken coop that was sitting for the past 3 yrs. The wire was still tied together but we freed up the posts quickly and drove them down.

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You can see the flow of water going through the lines. You can believe that after a couple hard days of bending over, pulling, getting cut up by chicken wire and hammering, I needed some rest. By the way, the reason why I have double lines on that bottom row is because those lines were pre-drilled with 18" distance between the drip spouts. For spinach, I wanted to grow that closer at 9", so doubled it. As it turned out, I ended up drilling some holes in the other lines because I wanted my snap peas closer too.

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Before I leave the above picture, let me mention that this picture was taken before I could get to the hardward store and pick up more miscellaneous parts, like those little figure 8, end-of-the-hose clamps. So, you get to see Jack's green clamps in the above picture.

This weekend, it took 2 days to pull apart all that chicken wire and see what I had to work with. One piece (on the right) was fully intact and it hung up there perfectly. Jack thought we may need a center post for support when the plants got heavy. I think he's right, so that was added.

The 2nd trellis (on left) was a combination of 2 pieces from the coop. It also had a hole in it from where the chicken door was, but that will be covered up by green growth in no time. Looks like I need a few more posts to put in another trellis.

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We decided to try certain plants that did well with verticle growth to make the most of our space. The right trellis has Sugar Snap Peas. The trellis on the left will eventually have cucumbers & squash. I haven't decided if I'm going to make 1 solid row of those two or a single row of each.

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Above, you can see what has been planted so far. (used an old pic of the full garden but just know the trellis are there now)

And then I have this oddball picture that I wanted to share. Last fall, the kids were being grounded from electronics and so I had them do all my "seeding" on the corner of the porch. We pulled tons of seed off of old dead plants and saved them for future plantings. Funny thing is, they must have dropped a bunch of cilantro seed and some of it fell in the cracks. Now, I have some awesome cilantro growing in the most unusual place! I have even taken cuttings from it. It also makes a nice bug repellant for when we're sitting in those chairs.

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In the blue bowl on the left, it a pineapple that needs planting. I'm up to 5 pineapple plants now.
In the white bowl, water run-off caught from the bottom of the staghorn plant. I try to recycle rainwater whenever possible. It's so much easier than grabbing the hose to water the couple of potted plants on the porch. My biggest worry with that is making sure mosquitos don't begin to grow there.

Tomorrow, we go off to hydroponics class #2. I will have to blog up pictures of that class. We are planting seeds! Lettuce, to be exact.

God bless & Happy Gardening.
Robin

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