Projects

So besides the actual gardening and growing I had to do some related projects. First was a raincatch. This isn't really mandatory for the square foot gardening, but I do need it to grow my blueberries. As I mentioned in an earlier post, blueberries like acidic soil, and I got around that by putting the blueberries in containers. However I could ruin it all by watering the containers from the hose, adding in all the alkalinity from the groundwater. I'm surely not going to buy bottled or purified water, so I decided on collecting rainwater. I looked at raincatches at Home Depot (where I have been spending a disturbing amount of time and money recently) but they were too expensive and all seemed poorly designed. I decided to build a cheap one my own. I bought a 54 gallon Rubbermaid container, some 1 1/2 inch PVC, PVC elbow joints, screen, and zip ties. I think you can get an idea of the construction from the pictures:

I have no idea how well this will hold up, but the total of all the materials was around $28.00 and it took about 30 minutes to put together. The screen is to prevent mosquitoes from using the raincatch as a birthing pool.

Like a hobo Ive been keeping the rainwater in milk jugs and other bottles and hopefully this will be enough for the blueberries. After about two months rain and snow, I have about 40 gallons of water:

Yes, I know I drink a lot of soda.

For now Ive retired the raincatch. I have plenty of water, and when I run out I can just put the container under the drip line of the roof and it will be full.

The next project was a composter. Again, I looked at a bunch of fancy ones at home depot and they ended up being quite expensive. I bought a small, heavy-duty plastic trashcan and just drilled about 30 holes in the bottom and sides with a 5/8" boring bit, to allow oxygen into the compost:

In the end, this cost about 15 dollars and will be important for making my own compost for future plantings. Here it is after a month or so (I turn it every week or so):

ah Swiss chard...

Finally, I wanted to construct a kind of cage to prevent varmits from getting in to the vegetables and either eating the seeds, the fruit, or the plants themselves. I did it with 3/4" PVC and a few T and elbow joints. The top is a woven trellis and later I think I will put wire around the sides. I specifically made it so that I can scale it up by replacing the vertical supports.

Its going to be pretty awesome when I come out one morning and find a raccoon who has gotten himself trapped inside.

The Thirst Mutilator

With square foot gardening, you're filling your raised beds with a special blend of vermiculite, peat, and compost. Bartholemew suggests 1/3 of each. Austin Natural Gardener lets you buy compost by the pound, which was helpful and cost-effective, though I had to fill the bags myself. I did some calculations, basing it on a 5' x 5', 8" deep square. For the specific types, I bought:

"Revitalizer" (sold by Austin Natural Gardener), an excellent, fine compost, and it is a mix of 5 types of their compost (it was self-serve):

Vermiculite:


And peat moss:

I had already bought two other types of compost, plus Dillo Dirt! at Home Depot because you don't want homogeneous compost. I also picked up some other soils for a few projects (more later). Here are my materials:

Mel suggests mixing the components on a tarp, however the amount I needed would mean that I would have to mix 6-7 batches in the tarp. I settled for 2 batches and I eyeballed 1/3 of vermiculite, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 peat moss, mixing them with a rake and then again mixing them in the actual box:

unmixed components

close-up of post-mixture soil

I filled the box, then made a lattice from the woven nylon cord:

The soil cost around $175.00 and, in retrospect I bought too much for my box. I ended up with a whole extra bag of vermiculite (4 cu/ft per bag), almost a whole extra bag of peat moss (3.8 cu/ft per bag), and about 5 extra bags of compost (about 8 gallons/ bag). What can I say...my math sucks. The peat moss I can definitely use for a bunch of things, including blueberries, the compost will also be useful, but the vermiculite will be tough to use up. Anyone have suggestions?

The Method (with apologies to British Andy)

I've tried a few times before to start a garden and the biggest problem for me has always been the soil. Specifically, I didn't (still don't) really understand the whole soil Ph issue, and the thought of putting additives into the soil in specific amounts, then testing and re-testing the Ph until it hit some optimum demanded too much time and expertise. I did some initial exploration and discovered that our soil here in Central Texas is very clay-ey with a high (alkaline) Ph, so I figured that any soil enrichment would be a real pain in the ass.

By way of a solution, my mom suggested Mel Bartholemew's "Square Foot Gardening." The raised beds eliminate the whole soil Ph issue (because you just fill the beds with a specific soil mix), and the grid design maximizes space for crops, especially as opposed to rows. It sounded good to me, so I went ahead and bought Mel's book and decided to build the beds.

Lettuce in square foot beds at Austin Natural Gardener

By way of exploration I went to Austin Natural Gardener here in town to see what they had to say and, as you can see from the above picture, they had a few cool square foot gardens laid out. At my mom's suggestion I also checked out The Garden Girl, which turned out to be a pretty cool website. She uses the square foot gardening, but she also has some type of apparatus she puts over the beds to allow her chickens to pick bugs out of the soil and fertilize the beds when they are not in use. I would like to someday do that (it's apparently quite popular, thanks Don). One obstacle: the feral or semi-feral cats in our neighborhood. I'm sure the tyrannosaurus-sized one (judging by the piles of shit it leaves in our backyard), would be overjoyed to add chickens to whatever the hell else it eats.

eat mor chikin

Next: Building the Beds