Gardening
Beginning an Earthbox garden
19/11/09 16:05
I am not a professional gardener... not even a novice! This is my first year of gardening, and it was both a success and a disaster. I will chronicle my garden here.
I read Square Foot Gardening, which I think is THE best gardening book for beginners. The author has some very sound advice and planning for an easy garden. The idea of doing it in a small space with minimal fuss is perfect for beginners, small gardens, children, elderly, etc. Why did I not do square foot gardening in the end? Because I didn’t have a space in my small yard with the right sun to make the beds, and because my DH wanted me to do something that could be easily moved. So I did more research.
What did I go with? Earthboxes. WOW! They are THE container gardening system, hands down. And they have a forum to discuss and read about gardening in the boxes and in general. The Earthbox people are also very supportive of student gardens. www.earthbox.com is the website. I decided to get one of the student packages. I received 12 boxes and a classroom guide for teaching about the benefits and impact of gardening, as well as charts and papers for charting your garden results. It is cool! 12 boxes? Very ambitious, I know. But if you know me, I never do anything small.
OK! So the boxes come. What’s so special about them? Look at my pictures:
This is a picture of the box itself. You can buy soil already in it but I decided to mix my own. It is very expensive with the soil, around $70. I thought I could save a little by mixing my own soil. This was fun, but tiring, and ended up being my garden’s downfall... which I tell about later. Notice the really cool hole at the bottom left. There is a tube that sticks up and you water from underneath, by filling the box with water through the tube. This conserves water and helps you go longer between waters, and it also gets the water right to the roots.
So, I started seeding as soon as I ordered my boxes. What a disaster!!!
This is a seed starter kit I got at Wal-Mart... I think it is called Jiffy.
This was my garden plan for starting seed so I would know which seeds were which.
My sprouts became very long and leggy, and they fell over. The best I can gather is that I did not have a sunny enough spot for them to come up in. It seemed there was no where to put them in my house or outside that was not either dark or fully sunny and neither was right. I gave up and put my seeds right into the ground, because by now it is April.
Okay, the picture below is my cantaloupe and herbs. Basil and Rosemary did pretty good. Chives and dill, not good. They died. In the front of the cantaloupe, I put broccoli.
My strawberries. I had 3 boxes of berries. They kept sending out runners like CRAZY! There is a debate about cutting them; I finally cut them because they were trying to grow all over the yard. BUT, they say the first year strawberry crop is not that great. I had a few berries, not many. Most were eaten by bugs before I could get to them.
Here are all my boxes lined up against the fence. I also put in stakes and mesh for the vines to grow on. And I marked a number on the back of each box in a silver paint pen. This way I could keep a record of what I grew in each box for each year.
I also used 2 Topsy Turvy bags for a tomato and pepper. I am not really impressed with them. They fell apart at the end of the season. I did get fruit from both plants and they had no disease or pests, but my tomatoes and peppers in the Earthbox were fine, too.
After just a few weeks, my plants were looking fabulous!!!
Here is my cantaloupe, going crazy. You know, I only had one cantaloupe form on the whole thing? I had tons of buds, then they would die. NO BEES! That was my problem. I never saw a single bee. So, too late, I went out with a cotton swab and pollinated myself. You can actually tell the difference in female and male cantaloupe: females have the bud behind them (you can Google for pics). Then I got one cantaloupe. You are supposed to do it quickly, and some people even paint or mark their buds so they know which ones they pollinated. WILD!!!
My strawberries.. .looking great. *** The tubes (see previous pictures) for watering into are very low to the box, and I have a bad back. Standing over the box to water was killing me, so my wonderful hubby went to Lowe’s and got long PVC pipe and cut it down to a height I wouldn’t have to stoop over. COOL! Notice how everything looks fine for now, growing like it should, but then disaster struck me in several ways.
My tomato, overflowing everywhere. It was huge! I tried several things to stake it because the stores were out of the Ultimate Tomato Cage and had little success. Finally, I got the cages, and I really like them. Re-usable, pretty cheap, hold up nicely. Oh, and also easy to store after you put your beds down in the winter.
My cantaloupe, left, and zucchini, on the right. The plants took over and I couldn’t tell one from the other. They also tried to envelop my tomato.
Our first cuke, a Palace King.
Here is the salad I made from it. Tomatoes, sprouted lentils, cucumber, dressing, on a bed of spinach. It was delightful, and my inspiration to keep on gardening.
Okay, so what happened to ruin my awesome garden. 3 things happened: drought, it got hot really, really fast, and I made a HUGE boo boo in my soil mixture. We had a few veggies, but then my plants all started dying.
The drought and the heat sucked the life out of my plants. It got very hot here in Baton Rouge really early in the year, and the lack of rain and intense heat were horrible to many gardens. Since it was my first year in Baton Rouge, I thought the spring was normal, until I went to the farmer’s market. Everything seemed smaller. I planned a trip to a local fig farm, but when I went to the market and saw the tiny figs with no flavor at all, we skipped it. I wanted to make my own fig preserves, but that will have to wait for another year.
And what was the soil boo boo? Well, I mixed my soil in a plastic container:
See the lime in the picture... very BAD! I was using a mix of vermiculite, perlite, peat moss and dolomite (garden lime). I got the recipe from one of the most famous Earthbox users on the Earthbox forum. 70% peat moss, 20% vermiculite, 10% perlite, and 2 cups of dolomite. That sounded perfect to me! I got to work mixing. But each plastic container was only a third of the Earthbox size. So instead of having 2 cups of dolomite per box, I now had 6 cups! Not good, let me tell you. Of course, I was mostly done filling my Earthboxes before I realized this grave error. Now I had committed all that time and money into the mix, and I really didn’t want to throw it all away. So, I put some of each box into the remaining boxes and left out the rest of the lime. It was not a very good solution. My plants started out pretty good, but they ended up pretty lame. My tomato plants got big but not big tomatoes, my peppers were sad and tasted even sadder, and my cucumber and cantaloupe hated the lime. They grew, blossomed, then died off from the roots up.
So, I will post again about my plans for next year and my assessment of the Earthbox, Square Foot Garden, and Topsy Turvy.
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I read Square Foot Gardening, which I think is THE best gardening book for beginners. The author has some very sound advice and planning for an easy garden. The idea of doing it in a small space with minimal fuss is perfect for beginners, small gardens, children, elderly, etc. Why did I not do square foot gardening in the end? Because I didn’t have a space in my small yard with the right sun to make the beds, and because my DH wanted me to do something that could be easily moved. So I did more research.
What did I go with? Earthboxes. WOW! They are THE container gardening system, hands down. And they have a forum to discuss and read about gardening in the boxes and in general. The Earthbox people are also very supportive of student gardens. www.earthbox.com is the website. I decided to get one of the student packages. I received 12 boxes and a classroom guide for teaching about the benefits and impact of gardening, as well as charts and papers for charting your garden results. It is cool! 12 boxes? Very ambitious, I know. But if you know me, I never do anything small.
OK! So the boxes come. What’s so special about them? Look at my pictures:
This is a picture of the box itself. You can buy soil already in it but I decided to mix my own. It is very expensive with the soil, around $70. I thought I could save a little by mixing my own soil. This was fun, but tiring, and ended up being my garden’s downfall... which I tell about later. Notice the really cool hole at the bottom left. There is a tube that sticks up and you water from underneath, by filling the box with water through the tube. This conserves water and helps you go longer between waters, and it also gets the water right to the roots.
So, I started seeding as soon as I ordered my boxes. What a disaster!!!
This is a seed starter kit I got at Wal-Mart... I think it is called Jiffy.
This was my garden plan for starting seed so I would know which seeds were which.
My sprouts became very long and leggy, and they fell over. The best I can gather is that I did not have a sunny enough spot for them to come up in. It seemed there was no where to put them in my house or outside that was not either dark or fully sunny and neither was right. I gave up and put my seeds right into the ground, because by now it is April.
Okay, the picture below is my cantaloupe and herbs. Basil and Rosemary did pretty good. Chives and dill, not good. They died. In the front of the cantaloupe, I put broccoli.
My strawberries. I had 3 boxes of berries. They kept sending out runners like CRAZY! There is a debate about cutting them; I finally cut them because they were trying to grow all over the yard. BUT, they say the first year strawberry crop is not that great. I had a few berries, not many. Most were eaten by bugs before I could get to them.
Here are all my boxes lined up against the fence. I also put in stakes and mesh for the vines to grow on. And I marked a number on the back of each box in a silver paint pen. This way I could keep a record of what I grew in each box for each year.
I also used 2 Topsy Turvy bags for a tomato and pepper. I am not really impressed with them. They fell apart at the end of the season. I did get fruit from both plants and they had no disease or pests, but my tomatoes and peppers in the Earthbox were fine, too.
After just a few weeks, my plants were looking fabulous!!!
Here is my cantaloupe, going crazy. You know, I only had one cantaloupe form on the whole thing? I had tons of buds, then they would die. NO BEES! That was my problem. I never saw a single bee. So, too late, I went out with a cotton swab and pollinated myself. You can actually tell the difference in female and male cantaloupe: females have the bud behind them (you can Google for pics). Then I got one cantaloupe. You are supposed to do it quickly, and some people even paint or mark their buds so they know which ones they pollinated. WILD!!!
My strawberries.. .looking great. *** The tubes (see previous pictures) for watering into are very low to the box, and I have a bad back. Standing over the box to water was killing me, so my wonderful hubby went to Lowe’s and got long PVC pipe and cut it down to a height I wouldn’t have to stoop over. COOL! Notice how everything looks fine for now, growing like it should, but then disaster struck me in several ways.
My tomato, overflowing everywhere. It was huge! I tried several things to stake it because the stores were out of the Ultimate Tomato Cage and had little success. Finally, I got the cages, and I really like them. Re-usable, pretty cheap, hold up nicely. Oh, and also easy to store after you put your beds down in the winter.
My cantaloupe, left, and zucchini, on the right. The plants took over and I couldn’t tell one from the other. They also tried to envelop my tomato.
Our first cuke, a Palace King.
Here is the salad I made from it. Tomatoes, sprouted lentils, cucumber, dressing, on a bed of spinach. It was delightful, and my inspiration to keep on gardening.
Okay, so what happened to ruin my awesome garden. 3 things happened: drought, it got hot really, really fast, and I made a HUGE boo boo in my soil mixture. We had a few veggies, but then my plants all started dying.
The drought and the heat sucked the life out of my plants. It got very hot here in Baton Rouge really early in the year, and the lack of rain and intense heat were horrible to many gardens. Since it was my first year in Baton Rouge, I thought the spring was normal, until I went to the farmer’s market. Everything seemed smaller. I planned a trip to a local fig farm, but when I went to the market and saw the tiny figs with no flavor at all, we skipped it. I wanted to make my own fig preserves, but that will have to wait for another year.
And what was the soil boo boo? Well, I mixed my soil in a plastic container:
See the lime in the picture... very BAD! I was using a mix of vermiculite, perlite, peat moss and dolomite (garden lime). I got the recipe from one of the most famous Earthbox users on the Earthbox forum. 70% peat moss, 20% vermiculite, 10% perlite, and 2 cups of dolomite. That sounded perfect to me! I got to work mixing. But each plastic container was only a third of the Earthbox size. So instead of having 2 cups of dolomite per box, I now had 6 cups! Not good, let me tell you. Of course, I was mostly done filling my Earthboxes before I realized this grave error. Now I had committed all that time and money into the mix, and I really didn’t want to throw it all away. So, I put some of each box into the remaining boxes and left out the rest of the lime. It was not a very good solution. My plants started out pretty good, but they ended up pretty lame. My tomato plants got big but not big tomatoes, my peppers were sad and tasted even sadder, and my cucumber and cantaloupe hated the lime. They grew, blossomed, then died off from the roots up.
So, I will post again about my plans for next year and my assessment of the Earthbox, Square Foot Garden, and Topsy Turvy.
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Rain Barrels!
11/11/09 17:32
We bought 2 rain barrels at the recycling truckload sale sponsored by our city’s recycling center. They sold rain barrels and compost bins at a fraction of the cost we would buy them at. We think they are very attractive and they were easy to put in. DH had Veteran’s Day off, but we put him to work on honey-do projects. He cut the gutters down and put the barrels on a concrete pad so they won’t get hit by the weed-whacker. They look so awesome! Now, we have to wait for rain!!! I’ll be interested to see how much water pressure there is in the barrel.
Why in the world did we put in barrels? 1 main reason: hurricanes. Sometimes we get hit by hurricanes and we wanted a source of water if ours gets knocked out. We won’t drink this water, but use it for our toilets, and washing dishes; things like that. When there is no storm coming, I’ll use the water to water our lawn and garden. It will save a little money on our water bill, which is always good.
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Items you can COMPOST
10/11/09 06:07
What can you compost? Well, we purchased a compost bin called an Earth Machine this past weekend, and I learned about what you can and can’t compost. The list for what you can NOT compost is so much smaller:
Items you SHOULD NOT put in the compost pile:
1. dog or cat poo
2. meat and bones
3. large quantities of milk, cheese, and other dairy products
Items you CAN compost:
1. Used tissues: like Kleenex, yes it sounds gross, but you can recycle a used tissue!!! We have a lot of that around my house.
2. Chicken and bird poo
3. Cage cleanings from birds and hamsters
4. Vegetable matter from kitchen (chop into pieces if possible), including banana peel, other peelings, apple cores, and unusable veggie pieces, fruit cores and peelings including rinds, potato peelings (my daughter says to “be mindful of your peelings,” for all you Star Wars fans out there).
5. Freezer burned veggies and fruit
6. Veggies that have gone bad in your fridge
7. Paper and shredded paper
8. Hair and pet hair
9. Small pieces of light fabric (cut into small pieces)
10. Bread
11. Canned veggies gone bad
12. Cardboard and newspaper in small pieces
13. Tea bags and coffee grounds
14. Egg shells
15. Paper Napkins and towels
16. Post-it notes (be sure to use it first by writing something romantic to your spouse and sticking it to his mirror)
17. Wood chips
18. Lint from dryer, dust bunnies, etc.
19. Popcorn, corn cobs (need to be cut into small pieces or they take a long time to decompose)
20. Fish (in small amounts or you may attract critters)
21. The collection of stuff from your vacuum and hand vac. You may have to cut up the bag if you use one, but of course, we ALL have a Dyson, right?
21. spices, herbs and garden clippings
22. waste from a home brewery or wine kit
23. Invitations to office parties
24. Ashes from wood fires
25. Sawdust
26. Houseplants and trimmings
27. Pasta, cooked or not
28. Jello
29. Lime or limestone, fish meal, blood meal, dolomite
30. Water and materials from your aquarium (not rocks)
31. Old flower arrangements
32. Potato chips
33. Leftovers from dinner like rice, veggies, bread. NO MEAT or BONES!
34. Old cereal. You can even compost that soggy stuff your kids never eat, but only a little milk, not a lot of milk.
35. Nut shells, like peanut or walnut, etc.
36. Electric razor trimmings (now you have no excuse to shave your legs in winter, ladies)
37. Toenail and finger clippings, if you feel the desire.
38. Shrimp shells... and for you bayou folks, CRAWFISH shells (personally, I’d put the whole nasty crawfish in there, but I’m not a bayou native).
39. Pie crusts
40. Leftover hot grains like oatmeal, bran, Grape Nuts, Scottish oatmeal, etc.
41. My children suggested composting their chore list, but I reminded them that I may have to compost their allowance. No deal.
42. Mac and cheese (this sounds blasphemous around our house).
43. All the receipts you hide from your spouse.
44. Soil
45. Leaves, small sticks and grass clippings
Like all things in life, balance is the key to compost. Dry leaves and green grass should be balanced out so they compost well together. Not too much paper. You can get lots more info on composting at your local extension office, or Google composting.
We already recycle in our home. Our city has a program to pick up paper, metal, plastic and glass. There are a few things we decided to do after we bought the composter to “reduce our footprint.” We bought a second trash can for the bathroom to put tissue and cotton swabs in to compost. Other trash goes in the regular can. My children, being the apples that did not fall far from my tree, immediately asked if they were supposed to wipe and throw the TP into the compost can. Uh, no. Since I’m six feet tall, I leave a pretty big footprint as it is, but I will only go so far. I placed a kitchen pail under the sink and already I have filled it 2 or 3 times. It’s amazing how much we toss that can be composted; most are veggies peelings, eggs, kleenex, and paper napkins. My pail directions said to place a piece of paper in the bottom of the pail so everything slides out. It works.
Like everything else, this will take some time getting used to. But I think our world is worth it.
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Earth Machine Composting
10/11/09 05:50
This weekend, our recycling center for Baton Rouge held a compost bin truckload sale. Earth Machines are neat plastic containers that hold tons of compost-able materials. They run about $100 online, but at this sale, we got them for $30. They also have a compost turner to stir your compost, and a kitchen pail for your kitchen scraps. I’ve been waiting over a year for this sale, and there was a bonus, 55 gallon rain barrels for $50! We had some rain barrels but they were quite ugly and we never installed them. These are very attractive and they have a large screen on them to allow rain in and bugs out.
But, back to the composter. Why did I want one? I wanted to have a compost pile, because I am getting into gardening. Compost makes sense and is great for my garden. I have the materials on hand, why put them in a landfill? So, I bought 2 bins, figuring I’ll use them both. My daughter helped me install them and rake the back yard. We have a small yard, but we filled them both up (before wetting the compost). Here are some pictures:
My small backyard and the grass that is dying. They put sod on top of a clay bed, and the rain has eroded all the sod and soil away. Now we have a dusty or muddy mess.
You can see my Earth Box garden in the back. have 12 boxes that I planted in for the first time this year. It did not go really well because we had a horrible drought and it got blistering hot early, which damaged my tender plants. Next year will be better, or I will be re-locating my boxes. It was a perfect spot for them in my small yard because we have a drainage ditch across the back forty (feet) of our yard, and they were on the other side of it.
Compost girl! She put them together, staked them down, and also raked and filled them with me. She was so awesome!
My bins installed. I wanted to find a place out of the way, convenient to dump household waste in, but a place that had good drainage. Can’t ut your bin in a mudhole! We think we found a good spot.
This is one of the bins after I wet it and turned it. I think it is about 2/3 full. I have dry leaves, green thatch grass, and some household materials in the bin. I turned it, wet it, and sealed it up! Now we need some hot weather! LOL! I’ll post a list of things you can compost soon. What do you think?
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Read More...
But, back to the composter. Why did I want one? I wanted to have a compost pile, because I am getting into gardening. Compost makes sense and is great for my garden. I have the materials on hand, why put them in a landfill? So, I bought 2 bins, figuring I’ll use them both. My daughter helped me install them and rake the back yard. We have a small yard, but we filled them both up (before wetting the compost). Here are some pictures:
My small backyard and the grass that is dying. They put sod on top of a clay bed, and the rain has eroded all the sod and soil away. Now we have a dusty or muddy mess. You can see my Earth Box garden in the back. have 12 boxes that I planted in for the first time this year. It did not go really well because we had a horrible drought and it got blistering hot early, which damaged my tender plants. Next year will be better, or I will be re-locating my boxes. It was a perfect spot for them in my small yard because we have a drainage ditch across the back forty (feet) of our yard, and they were on the other side of it. Compost girl! She put them together, staked them down, and also raked and filled them with me. She was so awesome! My bins installed. I wanted to find a place out of the way, convenient to dump household waste in, but a place that had good drainage. Can’t ut your bin in a mudhole! We think we found a good spot. This is one of the bins after I wet it and turned it. I think it is about 2/3 full. I have dry leaves, green thatch grass, and some household materials in the bin. I turned it, wet it, and sealed it up! Now we need some hot weather! LOL! I’ll post a list of things you can compost soon. What do you think?blog comments powered by Disqus
Read More...
