Dry weather gardening! Getting ready! Pics

[braggscowboy]

I have onions, lettuce, and radishes to eat now. Had hard time getting up the okra. Got rid of cutworm, used big nails. That fixed him! Going to try this for the summer. Have always used the pvc to water new trees. Should work on plants. 24" inch pipe on the shorter pipes with one hole in side with about 8" in the ground. 40" on the tomatoes. about the same in the ground. Can also use to put fertilize in. Can't water enough above ground here in this sandy soil, burns up things. Will use a funel and bucket or hose where I can. As the Okies can attest to, boy it wcowboy/PVCgardening007.jpg[/IMG]ill get dry.

[hillbillyacre]

BEAUTIFUL garden!!! I love how you have everything organized and fixed up.

[Pamela]

really beautiful.

[sisterpine]

Where did you put all the weeds? lol You have crops up in the garden and my greenhouse is still covered with snow.

[calliemoonbeam]

Good job BC! I met a guy at Goodwill a while back (we were both looking at gardening books and got to talking) that told me about doing this, only he said to drill about a dozen small holes in the pipes at the bottom and to put some small rocks at the bottom of the hole before putting the pipe down in there. He also said to go down about 12". He said he'd been experimenting with it for several years, and that was what gave him the best performance.

I was planning to try it on a few things this year, but now it looks I'm probably leaving things in buckets again. Let us know how yours works out, if you don't mind!

[akaRach]

very ingenious! and looks great

[farmergirl]

Where is all the bermuda grass? lol

Looking GREAT!

[7thswan]

Very Nice! No Gardening here yet.

[chickenslayer]

Nice, I wish the ground would dry out here, another couple of inches of rain today. I'm thinking of using my boat as an ark if this wet weather keeps up.

[Freya]

Kinda like using ollas in the desert!


Looks nice! :happy0035:

[braggscowboy]

Thanks everyone. I have not used the gravel, except to drain my hydrant. As I said, works for newly planted trees and shrubs. This size garden makes all the wife and I need, with some to give away and can what we want. I only put out about 10 tomatoes this year and I normaly I do about twice that. I have found if you can take care of fewer well and not a have a garden that is too large that you can't take care of, you can make just as much with a small one. Have a friend a mile or so over always puts out a large garden and can't take care of it or don't, fishing and hog hunting gets in the way. I wind up giving him stuff. As for the grass and weeds. I work on it and now outside material comes in unless I buy a few sacks of dirt or potting soil and mix from time to time, even though I have horses with horse manure that I could use.
They eat grass and that makes seed in it. It is that clean each year and stays clean. I would like to have it some bigger and could have a much larger one, have plenty of land, but can't for the deer. I have planted sunflowers two years for the birds and the seed and there is a point that they like the sunflowers, like when the flowers get about the size of golf balls and in two nights they wipe it out completly and no more flowers will set on or didn't. This is about a 1/2 acre. Did post othere pics, but did not get there. Will send a couple of others later. Still need rain, did get 1 1/4" week ago today, but with the rain comes storms now here.

[barnyardgal]

nice & neat looking garden,also like the decorations in there...very pretty set up..

it don't take a big garden to feed a couple of people...

[julieq]

So lovely! Thanks for sharing. Love the windmill too!

[Oldcountryboy]

Br'cowboy, your garden looks great for as dry as it is. The other night tornados and thunderstorms ripped all through Oklahoma and I hardly got a drop of rain to speak of. 3 miles away from my house they got downpours. Puddles everywhere but all the major rain went around us. So I am still delaying planting my corn as my patch of corn is about double the size of your garden you just posted. I am going to transplant my watermelons and canteloupes this week and keep them watered daily. I hope my garden ends up looking as good as yours.

[Freya]

Update?

[Tricky Grama]

Originally Posted by farmergirl

Where is all the bermuda grass? lol

Looking GREAT!

Yeah, this is a problem here too. Had quite a bit of rain, so that's what happens.

[YuccaFlatsRanch]

Nice Garden BUT..... Where are your raised beds?? Raised beds do soooo much for a garden. Combined with square foot gardening 4 foot wide raised beds will triple your output while halving your water use, halving your garden prep, etc. Two book subjects to read - LASAGNE GARDENING, which you don't really need as you don't have grass to overcome in your garden, but which will teach you how to make easy raised bed gardens, and SQUARE FOOT GARDENING which will teach you that planting in ROWS is counterproductive. Square foot gardening treats each square foot of raised bed as its own little mini-garden. For instance when planting beans you plant 9 bean seeds, equal spaced apart in each 9 square feet. The leaves of each bean shade the ground and prevent weeds.

The advantage of raised beds is you NEVER have to till, and you NEVER walk on the planting soil. At 4 feet wide with 18 inches between the beds you can work each bed 2 feet in from each side.

There are only 3 gardening tools I ever use anymore - a pitchfork to turn in large amounts of compost at the beginning of each season or better yet at the end of each season if I were to live in a COLD weather area so that it could break down all winter. The other 2 tools are a HAND TROWEL and my HANDS.

The real multiplier of square foot gardening comes from the ability to keep every square foot in constant production of something. When I pulled my peas, I added compost to those squares that the peas were in and planted squash in some and tomatoes in others. When the tomatoes and squash come out for the winter, lettuces, spinach and other greens go in or maybe more beans if early enough to get the crop done before frost.

Lastly as you get up in age, the raised beds make it easier on old backs to keep gardening. My beds are in the process of one each year of getting raised up to 2 cinder blocks high and someday to 3 blocks high.

[am1too]

Originally Posted by farmergirl

Where is all the bermuda grass? lol

Looking GREAT!

I didn't see any concrete.

[Freya]

bump

[Freya]

Oops nevermind... just saw the other post!

Link for others: Update on PVC Garden!