when are you sowing your garden this year?

[TheGrey]

This link has terrific information as to what a square-foot garden needs. I would think the information could be used for any sort of gardening!

http://momwithaprep.com/square-foot-gardening-mistakes/

[Irving]

Thank you for the link, I was just browsing this thread today. Extremely interested in the PVC watering system.

[TheGrey]

I think I'm going to try it for some of my garden this year. I just have to figure out how best to set something up for the straw bale sections...

[Irving]

It seems like the idea is to build the system first, then plant around it. Having never had a garden before, this seems like a potentially large obstacle. I should be able to build the system simple enough to over come this though.

[Irving]

What about a mist system like you see for flowers? Seems like that might waste more water into the air than anything.

I built a screen for my compost pile today and never thought I could get so excited about dirt.

[hollohas]

Already harvested 5 lbs of strawberries this year. And they really won't start rolling in heavy for 2 more weeks.

Here's today's harvest.

[Irving]

So I've been slacking at filling my garden with soil. I had a free dirt deal going that never materialized, and now it's too late to be looking for deals. Do you guys/girls have a line on any places from which I should order some top soil? I can get 6 CU/YD from Home Depot for $162. Anything better than that?

Will it be too late to grow anything? Of course I don't expect some bumper crop with unestablished soil and very late planting, but I've spent too much money, and way too much time building this garden to not plant anything. Any help is appreciated.

[Erni]

Already harvested 5 lbs of strawberries this year. And they really won't start rolling in heavy for 2 more weeks.

Here's today's harvest.

Wow, trully impressed. How many plants and what garden setup?

Here is my meager entry into gardening. My knees are for crap and I did not want to have to keep bending. So a raised bed garden it is. 3x6 feet with 14 cubic feet of dirt. Getting to a late start as the structure took way more time to finish.

[TheGrey]

That's an impressive strawberry haul!

My idea for straw bale gardening went south when I read that it was not a good idea to use anything purchased from any store but a feed store- the use of pesticides is quite prevalent. That left me to do some digging into other options.

And I came across Larry Hall's method of gardening.

Is it beautiful? No. As a matter of fact, it looks ghetto as hell. Does it work? All signs point to yes.

I'll put a link to his Youtube channel; there's an awesome amount of stuff there. But I'll also briefly describe the set-up, because I'm wound up on cold medicine and am excited about this prospect.

The basic self-watering system for a garden is:

Reusable Walmart bags ($.50 each) filled with a soil mixture, set into a hard plastic kiddie pool. You put the plants in the bags, fill the kiddie pool with water, and the bags wick up the water and keep the plants hydrated.

I hit Toys R Us at their Memorial Day sale, and got 6 3' kiddie pools for $5 each. I hit Home Depot and bought 3 bags of Eko Compost, 3 bags of 3 cubic feet of sphagnum moss, and 3 bags of perlite. The mixture is 2 parts sphagnum moss to 1 part compost, to about 1/3 bag of perlite. Mix well- the perlite will make the soil mix "fluffy". I also had earthworm castings, so I mixed them in.

Unfortunately, the Home Depot Memorial Day sale has some REALLY good deals on organic garden veggie plants, so suddenly I was like the Old Woman that lived in a shoe, with so many plants she didn't know what to do. I set everything up in the back yard, and found the direct sun is REALLY direct on baby plants, so I unrolled the top of some of he bags to provide a bit of cover for them until they get stronger. The tomato plants also got Epsom salts in the soil, and some of that Magic Tomato shaker stuff I had picked out one year.

That sized swimming pool holds five filled Walmart bags. On a hot day like today my back yard feels like the surface of the sun. Those bags wicked water up like crazy, and I filled up the pools twice this afternoon. There's a way to set up some sort of a float and pipes and stuff, but I wanted to see how this would work out before I attempted Larry Hall's rain gutter garden system.

Remember to wear sunblock, people. Either that, or invest in a lot of aloe. Ouch.

Here's the Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/larrylhall

[hollohas]

Wow, trully impressed. How many plants and what garden setup?

Simple raised bed. Planted 6 plants in spring 2014. Now they have spread. All of those came from an area 2.5ft x 8ft but they are dense. They are like weeds! They are a chore to keep contained. The runners even try to grow out of my sidewalk.

I gave a friend a dozen that I dug up last year and I transplanted another dozen to a 4x8 bed on the other side of my yard last year too. Both sets of transplants are super healthy this year.

My dozen transplants are completely filling the 4x8 bed now. After this year I'm going to clear all the plants from the 2.5x8 bed and just keep strawberries in the separate 4x8 bed so I don't have to work so hard containing them.

Strawberries don't really get productive until at least the 2nd year. No one gives them a chance. And those clay strawberry pots at all the garden centers are horrible. They are completely wrong for berries and will never let your plants be productive.

Picked another 3.5 lbs from the same 2.5x8 raised bed area today. Will be making jam this week.