Category: Garden technology

  • Adding shade in the garden

    The front door of our house faces east towards the Pacific Ocean. (A mere 10 miles west!) Our backyard garden sit on the top of an exposed his with full eastern sun.

    For three seasons that really isn’t a big deal. In fact, because we can get full sun for about 75% of the garden it means that the other three seasons are great. But right now, in the height of summer sun, with June Gloom giving way to coastal San Diego’s July Fry, our plants are suffering.

    In both our tomato patch and where we currently have our melons, the plants obvious grow towards the north fence and away from the full glare of all day sun. Leaves on our cucumbers always look wilted. Once something gets established and can effectively shade itself we are totally fine. But often small plants never thrive.

    Today we made a small investment in a fix by adding some shade for the melon patch & the tomatoes.

    Here’s my supply list: (All from Home Depot)

    • Tan sun screen (6’x20′ = $31)
    • Garden stakes (9 x 4 feet each = $8.97)
    • Grommets ($7.96)
    • Zip ties (laying around the garage)
    • 2 hooks (also in the garage)

    The melon patch is 7 feet wide. I measured 24 inches from the fence and drove the 3 stakes down so 36 inches was out of the soil. I cut the sun shade to length and put 4 grommets across the top, 2 in the middle and 2 on the bottom. Next, I used a level to attach the 4 grommets to the fence securely. I draped the shade from the fence and over the stakes, making a little tent over the top.

    It’s a very simple design aimed at just keeping the sun off of them in the heat of the day. While I could stake down the bottom I don’t have it staked right now so I can easily flip the ends up and weed underneath.

    For the tomato patch I made it even simpler. I attached it to the fence on the north end draped it over the various bamboo stakes and then attached it to the fence on the other side.

    Zip ties were my friend. They made the whole process simple and entirely portable.

    The hope is that this solution helps lessen the direct sunlight and helps both the melons and tomatoes beat the heat to a better yield.

    We should know in a couple weeks.

  • Watering the Garden from the Perspective of the Hose

    Melinda’s Ohio garden is banging! What a fun perspective on caring for the harvest.

    Who knew the GoPro could be used in the garden?

    ht to Tom on editing & Melinda on watering.

  • Getting rid of garden snails

    The pitfall of organic gardening is that chemicals are easy!

    Our garden doesn’t have many enemies. The household cat keeps rodents and lizards away. And the combination of hummingbirds and parrots seems to keep all other bird pests from doing too much damage.

    Our biggest problem has been garden snails. (Helix aspersa) Since it has been an especially mild and wet spring we have even more snails than we did last year. And they can be very destructive to our garden. They eat holes in tomatoes and eggplants, and they have destroyed many leaves of our various attempts at salad greens.

    When I asked Farmer Bill over at City Farmers for the solution he laughingly said… “You need a French friend. They love snails.”

    Things that have worked “just OK”

    • Minimize watering since they are attracted to moisture. (Works in the summer, but this spring has been especially damp)
    • Eggshells (Not sure this worked, but it was easy and probably was a decent fertilizer)

    Other organic solutions (none of which we’ve tried)

    • Get a duck or chicken (We are very tempted to get chickens)
    • Line your garden area with copper wire (A little too expensive for me, would work if we had raised beds)
    • Grow marigolds between your vegetables since all sorts of pests don’t like the smell of them. (Really like this option, going to try it)

    Have I mentioned we still have a problem?

    Literally, the last step before finally going on Craigslist to pick out a chicken coop is to keep trying to find organic remedies for this problem.

    The Grapefruit Trap

    I was doing some reading over at Pat Welch’s blog to see if I could glean a tip from a San Diego County gardening expert. She educated me on a few items I didn’t know.

    1. She struggles with them, too. So I don’t suck.
    2. They hibernate in the citrus trees.
    3. She recommends a grapefruit trap as a potential solution.

    Thanks so much for writing to share your success using upside-down grapefruit peels as a trap for slugs. I like this trap better than beer or boards. Problem with boards is you have to scrape the slugs off the bottom of them. YUCK! But with half-grapefruit peels you can just pick them up in the morning and throw them away, slugs and all.Source

    So, that’s what we are trying. Our garden grows a very bitter grapefruit that is quite pretty but otherwise wasted. So I went out and cut some in half, took out most of the fruit, and placed them around the garden. I can’t wait to check them in the morning!

     

  • Irrigation

    We live in sunny Southern California. And while it is amazing to have 300+ days of sunshine per year it comes at a cost. Namely, we live in a coastal desert and have water restrictions.

    Thankfully, we are able to have a vibrant garden by using some smart water techniques.

    Where we are

    Back in January, when we first planted our garden, we bought a basic drip irrigation kit from Drip Depot. This kit came with everything we needed to get started. We had enough of the big tubing to run from our water spikket all the way around our yard. It also included enough of the smaller tubing and fittings to run water directly to every plant.

    Basic Garden Kit from Drip Depot

    This was great at first. But as the occasional showers of February – April came to a screeching halt and things dried up, we quickly found out that we weren’t able to distribute water like we needed to. Some plants were drowning while others were drying out. This was especially evident in our herb area. Everything was dying.

    So with each water cycle I kept an eye on what needed less water and what needed more water. I swapped out dripper and finally found a match for each plant to thrive.

    My next challenge was determining how often to water. I wanted an easy answer that I could program into my life. For some reason 12 minutes has become the magic number. And, in general, I lay down 12 minutes of water every other day. But I also adapt this to the weather conditions. A little hotter, I’ll wait 1.5 days between waterings. A little cooler or especially humid, I’ll go 2.5 days.

    Next steps

    Expansion: We have two more garden areas we’d like to expand to. If we’re able to do those expansions, one I will be able to add onto our existing system while the other is further away and I’d want to larger crops, so it’ll require its own irrigation system. Our neighbor also waters our fruit trees and I’d like to expand our system to be able to do that easier, as well.

    Timers: Our summer vacations revealed a new problem for this new gardening family. I drove 40 minutes each way every other day to water the garden. That hardly seemed “green” to me. So I’m looking at adding some timers to the system to help.

    Rain barrels: We don’t get a lot of rain in San Diego. But when we have our rainy season it’d be awesome to capture some for hand watering over the summer.

    Experiments: We have a few areas of our property that are difficult to get water to. I’d like to try a few ollas there to see how that would work. I have a feeling that it would work especially well for some types of vegetables and not so well for others. But, since we’d be expanding into areas not currently gardened, any yield would be awesome.

    Some pictures of our irrigation in action