Saturday, March 19, 2011

Catching Up

Last Saturday I continued working on my never ending water project. I now have soaker hoses in beds 3 and 4. Not that I need them with all the rain we have been having this week. But there will be a time in the near future that I will be happy I took the time to get the yard "hooked up". This will save me lots of time this summer and I will not need to rely on family to come over to water when I'm on vacation. My son was really happy to see me put the water lines in... as he said to me " it took me 45 mins to an hour to water your garden every other day when you were away". Ha ha! Tell me about it!

I still have more to do to get everything in the yard "hooked up". Bed 2 needs soaker hoses added to it. It currently had over head sprinklers. Beds 1, 5 and 6 still need water lines as well as all the potted plants. The photos below are of bed 4 with the soaker hoses.

Click on photos for a larger view

Square foot garden bed with water lines
The two tools I could not live without during this project...
Hose hole punches
If you are thinking about adding water lines to your beds I was doing some research on line and came across this video from the Garden Girl Patty Moreno on how to install a drip irrigation system. Which I found helpful even though I'm working with an existing sprinkler system.

On Thursday (March 17th) I about scared myself to death. I was working from home and about 9:00am the sun was shining on the patio so I thought I would take the tomato and cucumber seedlings out of the greenhouse and give them a little morning sun. So out they came and I went back to work. I walked by the window about 10:00am and looked at the cucumbers and saw this....
 Oh no! what have I done! I've killed all my cucumber starts! So what was it.... was it too much sun? No it was cool out... that's it... it was too cold and a bit too windy... I moved the cucumbers back into the greenhouse and gave them some water. After about an hour they came back. Boy was I lucky!
The tomatoes had no problems with the cool air and wind. In the photo below you can see some blooms on this cherry tomato.
 I really should pot these up one more time before they go out into the garden.
Tomato starts
Even though the weather has been cool the bok choy and pak choy is already starting to bolt. I will need to pull them as soon as it stops raining long enough for me to get out into the garden.


The carrots that I started in the greenhouse are doing so well. Who said you can't start carrot seeds indoors and transplant them out into the garden?
The sweet and hot peppers are doing much better than I thought they would in this cool weather. They have been off the heat mats for about three weeks now.
The raspberries seemed to have sprouted overnight.
And the nectarine is in full bloom.
The first apple leaf...

And finally the sweet potatoes. They are rooting very well. I updated my Sweet Potato post with some new photos. Scroll to the bottom of the post for the update.

As I finish up this post the winds are started to pickup and the rain is coming down. Be sure to check out my post on the hail storm we had this morning. Here is the link if you missed it.... Hail post
That's it for now. Happy First day of Spring!

8 comments:

  1. Aw, everything looks so green and happy! Of course I haven't seen the hail post yet... Glad you were able to save the cucs!

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  2. Hey Jenn! I was thinking about you yesterday. Hope all is well.

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  3. My goodness....your garden is really taking off! Those tomato plants do look like they could use bigger pots. They are huge!!

    Happy first day of Spring to you too!!

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  4. Robin - Well it was and is.... I just went out to see how things are doing after the heavy down pour of rain we had all day yesterday and last night... The carrots are fine as well as the spinach and onions but the snow peas, lettuce and broc are not looking very well. Way too much water at once and more coming. We will have rain on and off for the next seven days. Time to plant some more carrot seeds :-)

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  5. I'm fascinated by the water project. Should make life a lot easier for you this summer!!

    I tried some sweet potatoes a few weeks ago, but got nothing. Just some wet, moldy sweet potatoes. Any tips?

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  6. Potted Farm - I have some in a dark pantry that are starting to sprout. Try that before putting them in water.

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  7. Liisa, do you collect rainwater?

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  8. Hi Spiderjohn - I don't have a "real"setup but do put buckets around the shed to collect what I can. I cannot collect water off the roof of the house because it is a rubber roof painted white. The water is not what I would call safe. The little that I do collect is used to water my seed starts and anything left over is used in the beds until it runs out. I would love to have a setup just not sure I have the space for it... but I keep thinking about it.

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