The early snows this year have given me serious greenhouse envy. I had a lot of tomatoes still on the vines when the first snow hit and killed everything off. I can't help but think that if I had some sort of a greenhouse, I could have saved those tomatoes. Now when I pass a yard with a greenhouse in it, I get seriously jealous.
Mother Nature sure likes to give us gardening challenges here in Pine Cove. And each year I try to outsmart her just a little more, with varying degrees of success. At my current residence, I have large, in the ground gardens so building green houses over them would be very expensive and time consuming. Plus they get the hot afternoon sun and in the summer it would be a constant battle to keep them from frying the plants. If they were portable, they would be so big that storing them would be a problem. But as luck would have it, I will be moving shortly and starting all over with a new garden. So this time I am going to garden smarter, not harder.
Being a tad over 40, my knees and various other joints now protest when I spend too much time bent over or kneeling down tending to garden chores. So in order to continue gardening well into my fast approaching golden years, I have decided to make all raised bed gardens at my new house. What doesn't fit in the raised beds will go into containers (on platforms with wheels for easy moving) or window boxes.
But of course, it doesn't stop there. My greenhouse envy now has me pondering how to make either greenhouses or cold frames to fit over the raised beds. If I am going to go to all the trouble of building raised beds, I might as well install some sort of greenhouse protection as well. I am going to do some research and report back here. I am not sure what exactly I will come up with, but I will also post pictures when my projects get underway. In the meantime, I have to go out and dig up my now frozen and dead tomato plants out of my current garden.
Showing posts with label container gardening. Show all posts
Showing posts with label container gardening. Show all posts
Monday, November 21, 2011
Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Olla Update
As you all know, I put ollas in my garden this year around my tomatoes. However, I made one crucial mistake. I didn't allow enough room to get to them easily. As the tomato plants grew bigger and bigger, it quickly became like crawling through a jungle when trying to get to the ollas to fill them with water and developed into quite the unpleasant chore.
Since I was still harvesting tomatoes, up until last Friday, I have not yet dug them up to see if the roots of the plants had grown towards or around the ollas. Unfortunately, they are now buried under all this snow and my tomato plants are goners. So when I am able, I will go out and dig them up and try to see how the roots were growing and try to get a few pictures for the blog. You dont' even want to see my poor frozen tomato plants.
What I learned this summer was that if you make ollas out of clay pots like I did, it would be wise to to do a couple of things differently than what I did. The first thing you could do would be to place them along the edge of your garden where they will remain easy to access for filling. Don't bury them in between lots of plants that are going to get very big in a couple of months.
The second thing you could try is to enlarge the hole on the top pot and install a piece of PVC pipe up to a height that would be easy to fill. Not sure on the specifics of this, but you could probably drill some holes in the part of the PVC pipe that will go down into the olla to allow the water to come out and fill the olla. They you could just walk around and fill them from the top of the PVC pipe. Of course, I have not tried this yet, so it is all theory at this point.
The third thing you could do is to purchase ready made ollas that have the the tall spout on the top that sticks up out of the ground making them easier to fill. This is really the only problem I have found with using the clay pots. Since they are flat and at just about at ground level when buried, you have figure out a way to fill them easily. Each year is a learning experience and eventually I will get this down pat. If anyone out there has any ideas or knowledge about watering with ollas, I would love to hear your thoughts, experiences or ideas.
In addition to the above mentioned improvements, I also plan to try them in some raised bed gardens. I have decided that raised beds and container gardens will replace my in the ground gardens as I did not enjoy crawling on my hands and knees through the tomato plants with a hose to fill the ollas. Plus they are just so hard to work in with all the bending, stooping, kneeling and digging there is to do. There has to be an easier way and I am going to find it!
But using smaller, raised beds, I may be able to keep the ollas at the perimeter of the raised bed, thereby making filling them much easier. Or at the very least, eliminating the crawling on my hands and knees part. It would not have been so bad getting between the tomato plants had I not had to get on my hands and knees to do it.
I feel that gardening should be an enjoyable past time. While it is hard work and challenging at times, why not incorporate things that make it easier and more pleasant, like raised beds. I will be making mine tall enough that I can sit on the edge of them and do my gardening chores either standing or sitting. I think that will make gardening much more enjoyable and much less of a chore and perhaps some water saving methods, such as ollas, will be easier to incorporate into raised bed gardens than they are into the ground.
One thing I will report is that I was shocked at how often the ollas went dry. I was filling them daily until the last 6 weeks or so when I gave up and just watered the tomatoes normally. So I feel that they must have been doing their job superbly. The water was definitely seeping out and I am pretty sure I am going to find lots of tomato plant roots around each one once I can get to them.
All in all I would say that my olla experiment was a success and with some tweaking next year, I think it can be even a greater success. I will also work on some posts on raised bed, container and window box gardening in the near future.
Since I was still harvesting tomatoes, up until last Friday, I have not yet dug them up to see if the roots of the plants had grown towards or around the ollas. Unfortunately, they are now buried under all this snow and my tomato plants are goners. So when I am able, I will go out and dig them up and try to see how the roots were growing and try to get a few pictures for the blog. You dont' even want to see my poor frozen tomato plants.
What I learned this summer was that if you make ollas out of clay pots like I did, it would be wise to to do a couple of things differently than what I did. The first thing you could do would be to place them along the edge of your garden where they will remain easy to access for filling. Don't bury them in between lots of plants that are going to get very big in a couple of months.
The second thing you could try is to enlarge the hole on the top pot and install a piece of PVC pipe up to a height that would be easy to fill. Not sure on the specifics of this, but you could probably drill some holes in the part of the PVC pipe that will go down into the olla to allow the water to come out and fill the olla. They you could just walk around and fill them from the top of the PVC pipe. Of course, I have not tried this yet, so it is all theory at this point.
The third thing you could do is to purchase ready made ollas that have the the tall spout on the top that sticks up out of the ground making them easier to fill. This is really the only problem I have found with using the clay pots. Since they are flat and at just about at ground level when buried, you have figure out a way to fill them easily. Each year is a learning experience and eventually I will get this down pat. If anyone out there has any ideas or knowledge about watering with ollas, I would love to hear your thoughts, experiences or ideas.
In addition to the above mentioned improvements, I also plan to try them in some raised bed gardens. I have decided that raised beds and container gardens will replace my in the ground gardens as I did not enjoy crawling on my hands and knees through the tomato plants with a hose to fill the ollas. Plus they are just so hard to work in with all the bending, stooping, kneeling and digging there is to do. There has to be an easier way and I am going to find it!
But using smaller, raised beds, I may be able to keep the ollas at the perimeter of the raised bed, thereby making filling them much easier. Or at the very least, eliminating the crawling on my hands and knees part. It would not have been so bad getting between the tomato plants had I not had to get on my hands and knees to do it.
I feel that gardening should be an enjoyable past time. While it is hard work and challenging at times, why not incorporate things that make it easier and more pleasant, like raised beds. I will be making mine tall enough that I can sit on the edge of them and do my gardening chores either standing or sitting. I think that will make gardening much more enjoyable and much less of a chore and perhaps some water saving methods, such as ollas, will be easier to incorporate into raised bed gardens than they are into the ground.
One thing I will report is that I was shocked at how often the ollas went dry. I was filling them daily until the last 6 weeks or so when I gave up and just watered the tomatoes normally. So I feel that they must have been doing their job superbly. The water was definitely seeping out and I am pretty sure I am going to find lots of tomato plant roots around each one once I can get to them.
All in all I would say that my olla experiment was a success and with some tweaking next year, I think it can be even a greater success. I will also work on some posts on raised bed, container and window box gardening in the near future.
Friday, September 23, 2011
Frugal Friday
Today is the first day of autumn. That means summer is over and the gardening season is winding down quickly. I am always amazed at how fast the vegetable garden goes from lush abundance to looking like it's better days are long gone. It seems to happen over night. The good news is the tomatoes are ripening by the dozens and that means all sorts of yummy things like tomato pie, BLT's and of course fresh, homegrown tomatoes adding to just about everything I make from salads to pizzas.
I have also been sharing my bounty. I think as gardeners, we love sharing what we have grown with others. They always seem so appreciative and it makes me happy that someone else will enjoy what I labored all summer to grow. I should can some tomatoes, but I don't know if I will get around to it or not. Right now I am enjoying taking bags of tomatoes to unsuspecting neighbors and watching their faces light up!
Hope your garden was bountiful and that your autumn will be too!
I have also been sharing my bounty. I think as gardeners, we love sharing what we have grown with others. They always seem so appreciative and it makes me happy that someone else will enjoy what I labored all summer to grow. I should can some tomatoes, but I don't know if I will get around to it or not. Right now I am enjoying taking bags of tomatoes to unsuspecting neighbors and watching their faces light up!
Hope your garden was bountiful and that your autumn will be too!
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Space Saving Garden Ideas
The ingenuity of some people never fails to amaze me. At my home, I only have 1/5th of an acre of property. While I long for 4 or 5 acres, that probably will never happen, so I have to do the best I can with what I have. Gardening on a space that small sure is challenging. So while searching for some interesting material for the blog, I went to a favorite blog of mine call gardenrant.com to see what was going on over there. There is always a lot of info on that blog, but it was a picture that caught my eye. It was a picture of the garden of someone named Emily Goodman. She lived in an apartment with a paved over courtyard, but she still managed to grow an edible garden. They found pictures of her garden on Flickr, which is somewhere I never thought to look for gardening inspiration.
She did all of the usual things you do in a small garden like using pots and containers for edibles and she even re-purposed some items for use in her garden. She was growing tomatoes upside down, hanging pots on her fence and using and file cabinet drawers to grow herbs in. But what caught my eye was her strawberry towers.
That's right. Strawberry towers. PVC pipes with strawberries in them. Two large pieces of it with holes drilled up and down the length of it and were filled with dirt and planted with strawberries. Kind of a new take on the old strawberry pots. These strawberry towers were as tall as her fence and looked like they held several dozen strawberry plants in each tower. Now that is really clever because as we all know, strawberries take up a fair about of space in a garden. I just might have to give this a try in my own garden. It is like the old saying, "If you can't go out, go up." As I looked around Flickr more, I came across several other variations of this and it seems to be to be a quite logical way to grow strawberries in a small space.
As someone who would love to grow enough strawberries to not only make jam with, but to freeze for year round use, this is an enticing idea because I just don't have the space to grow that many strawberries in traditional beds. I think this fall as I get the garden ready for winter, I will have to give this a try and do some strawberry transplanting! So if you are going past my house one day and see PVC pipes springing up out of the garden, don't be surprised!
She did all of the usual things you do in a small garden like using pots and containers for edibles and she even re-purposed some items for use in her garden. She was growing tomatoes upside down, hanging pots on her fence and using and file cabinet drawers to grow herbs in. But what caught my eye was her strawberry towers.
That's right. Strawberry towers. PVC pipes with strawberries in them. Two large pieces of it with holes drilled up and down the length of it and were filled with dirt and planted with strawberries. Kind of a new take on the old strawberry pots. These strawberry towers were as tall as her fence and looked like they held several dozen strawberry plants in each tower. Now that is really clever because as we all know, strawberries take up a fair about of space in a garden. I just might have to give this a try in my own garden. It is like the old saying, "If you can't go out, go up." As I looked around Flickr more, I came across several other variations of this and it seems to be to be a quite logical way to grow strawberries in a small space.
As someone who would love to grow enough strawberries to not only make jam with, but to freeze for year round use, this is an enticing idea because I just don't have the space to grow that many strawberries in traditional beds. I think this fall as I get the garden ready for winter, I will have to give this a try and do some strawberry transplanting! So if you are going past my house one day and see PVC pipes springing up out of the garden, don't be surprised!
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