Irrigating Your Garden

Greetings from Florida. We found our garden in good shape when we arrived this fall. My DH couldn't wait to get the plants he started in Michigan into the ground. They were packed in the back of the truck at least four days...no water either. They seem to be okay, no worse for the travel. Of course the sun and warm weather perks up everyone...even plants!

The first thing after planting the lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, he rigged up his irrigation system through out the garden.You can see from the pictures he uses pvc pipe and spaghetti style tubes. Each plant has a tube to water it. With one flick of the faucet, the garden gets watered. No more hanging onto a hose. It's fast and easy.

As you can see, this is a raised garden. I like the look of it with the deep green metal sides. We have two 6' x 10' planters with ten inch sides and a walkway between them.

Garden Tip: Our neighbor across the street decided to irrigate his garden like this too. He found window spline from the aluminum retail store makes a great tube to use.

To read more about this garden, click on the raised garden label in the list at the right.

Square Foot Gardening

I am intrigued by the idea of square foot gardening. Mel Bartholomew, the creator and author of Square Foot Gardening, questioned why gardens had to be in rows separated by pathways. The answer was to be able to reach the rows to plant seeds and veggie plants, to weed, fertilize, dress, etc. Gardens laid out in rows and paths have been the accepted method of gardening forever. But what about the folks who have limited space?

Many urban dwellers have relied on container gardening with tomatoes, peppers, etc growing in pots on their patios.Square foot gardening allows these folks the opportunity to grow compact gardens making healthy and satisfying use of their property.

Bartholomew's plan is to build a 3x3 foot or 4x4 foot square made of 2x6 lumber, essentially a raised bed.  Mark off the square into one foot sections. Fill this box with good soil mix...and you know what a champion I am of having great soil for a successful garden. Begin by planting in one square foot section one broccoli plant, or one cauliflower plant, or 16 radishes, etc. After the cool crops are harvested plant the summer crops, one tomato plant, one pepper plant, etc, per one square foot. Cucumbers, squash and other crops are grown on upright trellises or wires. This is known as vertical gardening. Fall cold crops follow as the summer crops are harvested.

Families build several 4x4 boxes for their garden in as much space as available. They may have a 4x4 area of tomatoes only or plant four tomatoes in four of the sixteen squares and other crops in the remaining. The gardener can plan and  choose whatever works for him/her.

Wouldn't it be amazing to have only one zucchini plant so that you won't have to make a midnight run to sneak the extra zucchini onto your neighbor's porches? This plan allows you to grow the amount of food your family can eat and grow only what the family likes.

Square foot gardening is compact gardening. It brings all the benefits of growing your own veggies, as well as using the land in a responsible, helpful, sustainable way of living.

For more information check out the Square Foot Gardening website.

Getting the Garden Ready for Summer....Florida Style

This photo features our new raised bed garden. You can see where my hubby and our neighbor filled up the new raised area with horse manure and topsoil. (We are still eating the lettuce you see in front, so that will get covered when we pull it up before we head North.) They screwed down a dark mesh weed barrier fabric over the top of the soil hoping to keep weeds away while we are gone for the summer as well as to "cook" the soil, sterilizing it.

As you may gather, the soil in our backyard is sandy. Our hope is that with this raised bed of good, rich, sterilized soil, we will be able to grow fantastic vegetables next winter. (This was the coldest winter FL has experienced in 15 years. Not a good growing year.)

We will be heading North next week hauling all the little plants my DH has started for our northern garden. If you remember those tiny sprouts pictures in previous blogs, they are ready to transplant now. And again we start the next season of vegetable gardening...my husband's desire to garden 12 months out of the year. And so it goes.

This is my DH's new idea for our Florida garden. (Do gardeners ever stop trying to improve their gardens?) He traded some handyman work for these steel planters. He is planning to use them as raised gardens next year. Before we leave for the North this spring, he will clean out this year's garden, then fill the planters with a mixture of soil and horse manure.

We have two 6'x10' planters with 10 inch sides with a walkway between them. DH painted them Rustoleum hunter green and they are shiny and attractive.

BTW, he installed the planters around the present garden. As you can see, the plants held up pretty well under the freezing temps. We have cabbage, romaine lettuce, several lettuces, and onions in this planting. The other planter has tiny lettuce plants that he just transplanted from the cells and cauliflower and broccoli.