Laundry to Lanscape Greywater Project Update

Last spring my wonderful husband installed a laundry to landscape Grey Water system in our backyard. It feeds three fruit trees (a peach, some raspberries, and a fig) at the front end, and waters the vegetable garden at the back end. So far I have been thrilled with its performance!

Here is part one, and here is part two.

Some changes we have made: Shortened the lines and added a plug.

We shortened the lines by lopping off the last two pots on each line. The directions said it could support up to 30 pots, but of course I tried to make it longer. The last bit never got enough water. That part of the bed also got too much shade, so I am converting it to a wild flower patch.

 

Our Laundry to Landscape Greywater Project, Part 2

We have finished our Laundry to Landscape Greywater Project! It has been operational for a few weeks now and we are very happy with it. Click here to see part one of this post. Part one also has the link to the plans that we used.

Picture of the out-side part of the setup. You can see where the hole was drilled into the brick in the wall of our laundry room. This contraption allows air to escape the system, and has a back flow valve to keep dirty laundry water from going back into my washer. It also has a spot where you can hook in your regular garden hose into the system. (Part one shows the inside part of the system. The inside part has a valve that lets us direct the water into the sewer or out to the garden.)

The PVC pipe goes off to the left and meets up with a flexible water line at the fence line.

Mulch basin, empty. Garry is positioning an awl to drill a pilot hole in the water line. Once the water line is drilled, the white flower pot you see will have two large holes drilled into it to receive the water line. Water will drip out the small hole in the water line into the mulch basin - the whole thing will be covered over with mulch. The flower pot keeps the water line up out of the dirt and mulch, so that the hole does not get clogged.

Our Laundry to Landscape Greywater Project Part 1

We are finally getting our laundry greywater garden project under way. The design we are using is from Art Ludwig's book,"The New Creating an Oasis with Greywater"

We are starting at the garden end and working our way up to the house. Hopefully we will be all done by the time the spring rains are gone.

Here is a picture of one line dug with the mulch basins and pots in the ground. The black flexible water pipe has holes drill on the underside beneath the pots. The pots will be covered over in mulch, keeping all the grey water under ground.

Spring Garden Update 2011

We have been busy in the garden here at home switching the rows around so the vegetable garden is in 7 blocks of 8 feet by 16 feet each. I want to have less bare earth this year and more plants. We have also invested in more 12 and 10 inch clay pots to use in our subsurface irrigation. I was fortunate in coming across a grocery store that was phasing out its garden section and picked up some 12 inch pots for less than a quarter of their usual price.

Here is a close up of a 12 inch clay pot buried in the ground and filled with water. The hole is plugged with plumbers putty. The lid is a cheep plastic plate which usually has a rock on top to keep it from blowing away. The pots will slowly leak moisture to the surrounding garden soil. This is a very efficient way to water the plants planted near the pots. These pots use much less water even then drip irrigation. Water only goes to the plants around the pot, not all over the garden, and as the plants dry out the soil, they pull just the moisture they need from the pots. You can see a just sprouted squash plant next to the pot.

The pots are about 3 feet apart and I plant around them in a circle.

Here is one with a circle of broccoli, Swiss chard and chives around it. These were transplants. I gave them supplemental water for a few weeks to get them started, then they only receive water from the buried pot after that. Last year I cut my water use for gardening in half by using, rain barrels in the spring, subirrigation, and grey water in the summer.

Another benefit of using the buried pots is that, without water running across the soil surface less weed seeds sprout. Using this method in conjunction with heavy mulching, I hardly ever have to pull any weeds.

In the garden right now: broccoli, swiss chard, onions, potatoes, peas, lettuce mix, garlic, beets, tomatoes, many kinds of peppers, egg plant, many kinds of squash and cucumbers.

A pretty picture to end with.

The Bugs Bite Back, Weeds held in Check

This year has been a real battle against bugs. 

Last year I had a battle with cucumber beetles. They devastated squash and cucumber seedlings and spread disease in the garden. I made some changes to a few things and so far this year I have seen very few cucumber beetles.

First of all I covered all of my seedlings with fine row covers. This protected all my crops form cucumber beetles as well as from all kinds of caterpillars, and it really reduced aphid problems. Covers can be left on indefinitely for plants that don't need to be pollinated. The only thing I don't like about them is that it is more trouble to check your plants to see how they are doing. I like to check things everyday. To get around that I want to make some kind of hoop system that can be lifted up easily for checking plants.

My squash grew like gang busters under the row covers and did fine for a while after I uncovered them for pollination. Unfortunately last week I discovered hundreds of stink bus on my squash plants! These bugs can quickly kill a plant as tender as squash. I wasted lots of time trying to find some organic way to kill them (being a little squeamish about touching the stinky things) but nothing worked. Finally we resorted to hand picking and squashing the bugs (with gloves on.) The bugs have managed to kill two thirds of my squash plants and so far we have had no harvest. 
: (

This plot shows all that is left of once tall healthy, lush squash plants.

Water Conservation is Saving Me Money

Yesterday Garry shared the news that our water conservation efforts this summer have been paying off! I will share what I have learned this summer about reducing the amount of water you use, recycling some of the water you have, and using water more efficiently.

During the summer months our water bill usually goes up 100$ a month due to extra watering of the yard and gardens. Extra water is needed because it is much hotter and it usually does not rain much during June, July and August. This summer when I expressed a desire to more than double the size of our vegetable garden, Garry was reluctant due to the extra water we would need, especially since the cost of water here had just gone up. We set ourselves a challenge to conserve water anyway we could.

The first thing we did was heavily mulch all flower and vegetable beds. The mulch was "free" from a dying tree we had cut down. This reduces the amount of water you need since it reduces evaporation. It also eliminates competition for water by suppressing weeds.

The next thing was to install three connected rain-barrels to the only rain-gutter we have on our property, which is on our detached garage. This is making use of available water that is normally lost to you as run off.

Two empty 55 gallon barrels cost $7.50 each, and the parts needed cost about 25-30$. So about 23$ each to make a rain-barrel is quite a bit of savings over a store bought ($150 each) barrel. The third barrel is actually just a trash can stuck under the over flow from the other two. This one is handy for dipping my watering cans into for hand watering.

The rain-barrels have spigots for filling a watering can or attaching a garden hose to. We only need about half an inch of rain to fill up these three barrels, and they are good for several waterings of the new vegetable garden.

The next thing I did for water conservation is to stop watering the Bermuda parts of my lawn. I continued to water a few shady spots that had Saint Augustine grass only when the grass actually wilted. St. Augustine really doesn't need a lot of water to keep it looking nice, since it grows in the shade, but Bermuda needs a lot of water to keep it green in the hot summertime. My lawn did not turn completely brown as I had feared. In fact it still look pretty green even with no water, and it didn't look any worse than any of my neighbor's lawns.

Another thing I was already doing was using soaker hoses in all my flower and vegetable beds. Soaker hoses use a lot less water than overhead sprinklers because overhead sprinklers loose a lot of water to evaporation, and they water the ground indiscriminately instead delivering water directly to the plants roots. Watering with overhead sprinklers encourages weeds and really is a big waste. I snake soaker hoses through my beds so that mostly only the plants get the water, and I cover them with mulch to further protect from evaporation.

Next I did some research on, just how much water does a plant really need? I found that with drip irrigation a tomato plant only needs two pints of water a week! (I'm not sure if this holds true in Texas heat or not, but it was still way less than I had imagined!) This tells me that most of the water we are pouring on our gardens is wasted to run off, evaporation and migration down deeper than the roots of the plant. What a plant needs is moisture kept close to its root zone.

Even though I had been using soaker hoses in all my gardens, I still had the idea that the entire bed needed to look wet, so I was turning the water on strong enough to get the entire bed good and soaked looking. I learned something very important from the rain-barrels. Rain-barrels have very little water pressure. When hooked up to the existing soaker hoses overnight (a 50 foot hose) they would only release about 5 gallons of water. The area directly under the hose was good and moist, but a foot away was completely dry (I'm talking bone dry and cracked) - and my garden plants loved it! I began watering my flower beds (most of which are out of reach of the rain barrels) with much lower water pressure, so that the bed itself still looked dry but the plants were happy.

I also did some research on sub-irrigation which is applying the water below the soil surface directly to the plant root zone. In many parts of the southern-hemisphere farmers water gardens with buried porous unglazed pots. Water seeps out of the porous pots very slowly and waters plants growing next to it. These pots are so efficient that they use 10 times less water than a soaker hose! The reason for this is that the buried pots keep the soil around them consistently moist. The water is not running along the ground where it evaporates and encourages weeds. It also seeps slowly enough that it does not flow down too deep for the plants to reach.

I made my own pots by plugging the bottom holes of existing clay flower pots I already had and buried then in the new part of the garden that had no soaker hose yet. Next to the pots I planted pumpkins and squashes. These plants are growing huge with only the water from the buried pots! I top off the water in the pots only a few times a week when the water goes down a few inches.

I also learned that wilting plants do not necessarily need water. If the reason that they are wilting is because it is over 100 degrees outside, and not because the ground is dry, then leave them alone. They will perk back up in the cool of the evening.

Using rain-barrels, soaker hoses and sub-irrigation is using water more wisely. Now for water recycling. Water recycling is taking water you have already used in your shower or laundry, and reusing it in your garden. We accomplished this by putting another 55 gallon barrel setup outside under the laundry room window, and running the exit hose from the washing machine out the laundry room window into the barrel. One load of laundry almost fills the barrel. Once this was accomplished I felt I had more water than I knew what to do with! I really only need the laundry water when it is not raining at all.

So how much water did we save? My wonderful Hubby has kept a spread sheet for the last couple of years that has the amount of water we use each month and the amount we paid each month. (Don't ask me why he would spend the time doing this - that's just the way he is. Lucky for me.) Last July, when I watered per the old way, was unseasonably cool. Only a few days were over 100 degrees for the whole summer. This July we had 100 plus temperatures for weeks at a time. Even though it was so much hotter, my vegetable garden was two thirds bigger, and we added a separate herb garden, we used almost exactly 4,000 gallons less water in one month! The actual amount we paid between the two Julys was only 5$ less for this one comparison month, but when you consider that the price of water had gone up for this year on all the water that we use for everything else (laundry, dishes, bathing) in addition to what we used for the garden, then we saved quite a bit more.

So, I expanded my gardens, learned a lot about water, and saved money!

Keeping The Garden Going In The Heat

The last couple of weeks have been blazing hot! In the last 12 days it has been over 100 degrees 9 times. Yesterday it was 104! Needless to say I am struggling to keep everything watered and alive. The Laundry room water has been a great help in this, plus the 1/2 inch rain that filled 4 rain barrels. Most everything is doing alright, except the tomatoes which usually dont survive this time of year anyway.

I am in the process of getting the fall garden planted with new tomatoes, peppers, and various squash. Most everything has taken the heat just fine except for the new tomato  transplants - they were wilting badly every afternoon even with good water. My solution for that was to rig card board shades on the west sides of their tomato cages. I simply cut up some cardboard and used clothespins to attach them to the west side of the cages. This way the tomatoes get shade in the hottest part of the afternoon.

I am happy with what I have been learning in the water conservation area. What with rain barrels, grey water, and sub-irrigation pots I have drastically reduced my usual water bill, while actually doing a better job of keeping everything happy.

Grey Water, Blue Water

Our grey water laundry barrel is finished and we have been using it for about a week. We opted for the most low tech system - a hose out the laundry room window into the top of a 55 gallon drum equipped with a hose bib. I attached a panty hose leg to the end of the hose with a rubber band to keep lint out of the barrel. A full cycle of one load of laundry gives us about 45 gallons of laundry water. 

I wait for the full cycle to finish so that the laundry soap is diluted, then I hook up the garden hose to the barrel and to the soaker hoses in the garden. The soaker hoses are covered with mulch, so no water is puddling on the surface of the ground.

It takes many hours to empty the barrel this way, the pressure is so low that it takes an hour for a few gallons of water to go through the hose, but I think this is actually better water conservation  and better for the plants.

We were really blessed this week with half an inch of rain. It fell very slowly, so all of it was absorbed into the ground (our usual rain is a 10 minute downpour that all runs off.) Now I have full rain barrels as well as the laundry water to use. Only one small section of our house has gutters, so I dug out a bunch of tubs from the attic and set them under the eves to catch the rain. All of these tubs you see, plus the child's pool, were filled by that half inch of rain. I have already used most of that water up except for what is in the kiddy pool. (It has been close to, or over, 100 degrees every day for a few weeks now!)

I certainly felt like a pioneer woman lugging around buckets of water all over the yard. Hopefully we can get gutters and more rain barrels as time goes by. 

Water Conservation

Its close to the end of June, we can expect little to no rain from now until the end of August, and my rain barrels are all empty. About this time every year our water bills go up about 100$ a month. Even I can see that this is not self-sufficiency and that my garden is not saving me money. If we are to have an urban homestead that actually produces anything, then I have to find ways to conserve water.

I am already using a deep mulch on all my beds including the vegetable garden. I also use soaker hoses instead of overhead watering. Even with the soaker hoses I tended to waste a lot of water. I would forget that they were on and flood everything. I would forget to set a timer to remind my self to turn off the water. I bought timers that would turn the water off after a preset time. They worked for a while, then they started leaking. Then I had to remember to set a timer to remind myself to check the water timer to see if it was leaking! This is obviously not working the best.

I tend to think that plants really need a lot of water, but what plants really need is consistent moister. You can grow bean sprouts just by keeping them damp. Some hydroponics systems grow plants just by misting their roots. I need to find more efficient systems.

I remembered an old trick that I used to use. I took an old plastic milk jug, poked small holes in it with an awl, and buried it in the ground next to my newly popped up pumpkin seedlings. You fill the buried jug with water from the hose and the water seeps into the ground through the holes. None of the water is wasted on top of the soil where it will evaporate and encourage weed seeds to sprout. However with this system I am still left with the question of how often do I fill this thing?

Buried plastic milk jug.

I also remembered something I had read online once, about how in Mexico and South America farmers would burry porous unglazed clay pots in the ground and fill them with water. The water seeps out very slowly and waters plants planted next to the buried pot. I checked on the price for some of these pots and they really were too expensive for me. I thought that I ought to be able to use a regular clay flower pot with the hole plugged and something set on top to keep out mosquitoes. 

I looked online and found many people who had done just that. I also found many scientific papers on the benefits of using buried clay pots! I found out that a buried clay pot can save 10 times the amount of water over a soaker hose! The reason for this is that the pots keep the soil around them consistently moist. The water is not running along the ground where it evaporates and encourages weeds. It also seeps slow enough that it does not all flow down too deep for the plants roots to reach, as it may do with my buried milk jug.

So now I am running several experiments. I took one milk jug out and replaced it with a big 12" clay pot next to the pumpkin seedlings. I left one milk jug buried and will plant some cantaloupe next to it. I buried a clay pot in the center of a large plastic pot that I plan to plant lettuce in. I buried a clay pot next to a butterfly bush that always wilts when all the plants around it are OK. Yes it will be work to fill these pots up, but the few that have been in the ground for several days have lost very little water. I am anticipating the water lasting at least a week or more. As much as I have always wanted the ease of an expensive in-ground sprinkler system, I know such a system would definitely not meet my goal of saving water, so I am content to lug hoses and watering cans around to fill pots.

12" unglazed clay pot next to pumpkin seedlings, uncovered

I use clay or plastic saucers to cover the buried pots.

Clay pot in a plastic pot. You can see the moist soil around the clay pot. The pot actually is almost full of water, but it disappeared in the photo. 

We plan on adding more rain barrels and are on the hunt for a 275 gallon water storage drum. We see them advertised used a lot, but have no pickup to go get one with. There is a place we drive by that has them, but we need to figure out a way to contact then and see if they will sell us a used one. I know just where I would like to put it. Meanwhile in the absence of rain we are thinking now of grey water.

Garry and I are looking into ways to use the grey water in our home. Grey water is the water from your laundry and bath. This water is just wasted down the drain when it would be perfectly good for watering plants. In Texas its legal to use grey water as long as you are not just pouring it on the ground. It has to be going through a layer of mulch seeping from a pipe buried under the mulch, or be going directly into the ground. 

I have seen very simple systems that just utilize a hose out the laundry room window that goes into a barrel outside. More elaborate systems will use valves that let you choose if you want the water to go down the drain, or out to your garden. If you collect the water in a barrel it has to be used right away, after a few days it can go bad, so we plan to use a barrel with a hose spigot so we can connect a garden hose either to our existing soaker hoses, or I can use the water to fill buried pots. Our laundry room window faces the back yard right in a corner where I am planing to try and plant a Forest Garden. More on that later.

Laundry room window. This shady corner is the future Forest Garden.

Until we get this set up I am going to feel criminal every time I let my laundry water go down the drain!

The last thing I am still thinking about is using a shade cloth over the vegetable garden. Plants out of the direct sun, and the sun can be brutal here, use less water.

What I did today in the Garden

I thought I would start a running post of my day to day gardening activities, when I actually do something. It will live over in the side bar henceforthly.

Wednesday May 12, 2010

I obviously have not been keeping up with this post. My entire spring and summer vegetable garden has been planted and we are already almost through with the spring stuff like lettuce and broccoli. Here is a list of things I recently planted around the house. In the herb garden: Cinnamon Basil, Purple basil and curly leaf basil, Pineapple Mint, chocolate Mint, Stevia, curry plant, salad burnet and more lavender. Else where here and there: Malabar Spinach on a pretty trellis, four o'clocks, moss rose, black-eyed susan vine, cosmos, and bachelor buttons.

Thursday March 4, 2010

In a gap in the rain we planted 4 packs of onion sets, cabbage, swiss chard and lettuce transplants.

Saturday February 27, 2010

Today I got back in the garden again. All of December and January we raked leaves on top of the vegetable garden and it did a great job of keeping out the winter weeds. I will be transplanting soon! Today I raked back the leaves in the spot where I plan to plant onions and I buried some watering pots. The soil is still too wet to dig in yet.

Monday December 7, 2009

I see that I haven't posted here for  while. Shame on me, I will have to recap. Our first frost was sometime late in November, but it was so mild that it only slightly hit the pumpkin vines,  everything else was fine. Since then we have harvested everything we could that was in danger, Okra, peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, squashes, broccoli, and last of all the pumpkins. I discovered that soft green pumpkins can be cooked just like zucchini, and that hard skinned green pumpkin can be set in the sun to ripen, just bring them in if it is going to freeze.

What is left in the garden is cabbage, carrots, the broccoli stalks which I hope will still produce some shoots, mustard greens, Brussel sprouts, and garlic.

We have a problem with winter weeds in this part of Texas, especially hen bit taking over the garden during the winter, so I will have to get busy remulching everything and stay on top of the weeds. If I had a shredder it would make cleaning up the garden so much easier.
      
Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Today we picked our first pumpkin ever! It was an accident since we were messing with it to see if it was ripe and the stem snapped, so it was "picked." It was ripe and it weighs 12.5 pounds. I am thrilled to have grown our first pumpkin.


Thursday September 24, 2009

Planted seeds of Lupine amongst the Irises and in various spots. Planted three types of Echinacea (purple cone flower), Thunbergia (black eyed susan vine), Malabar Spinach (an edible perennial vine) and a climbing vine mix on part of the picket fence.

Saturday September 19, 2009

Time to plant seeds of beets, carrots, lettuces, mustards, radishes, rutabaga, spinach, kale, leeks, and peas. A few fast growing herbs can also be planted such as parsley, dill, cilantro and basil. Wildflower seeds and certain perennials - foxglove, lupines, daisies, poppies, delphinium, coreopsis, dianthus, grasses, eupatorium and veronica - can all be planted now. Planting chart.

We planted carrots, a French lettuce mixture, and some mustard. We sunk a few more sub-irrigators into the ground beforehand for watering. After all that, Anna and I sprayed the soil in various hot spots with predatory nematodes to kill the larvae of various pests such as spider mites, flea beetles, and cucumber beetles. The nematodes were mixed in water and sprayed with a pump sprayer by me, then   watered in with a watering can to make sure the nematodes went down into the soil by Anna.

 Claire worked on a project to renovate a path  to block the grass from growing.   . Garry was scraping paint from the back picket fence all morning while the girls and I worked in the garden.

We  harvested some okra, yellow squash, butternut squash and our first acorn squashes, and a large bowl of lima beans.

I was pretty ambitious that day and wanted to get started on a project for the front flower bed, the one directly in front of the front porch. This bed gets so much shade that not much will grow there.

Well I got as far as moving a few things that needed more sun to a different bed, and raking back the mulch, then I was pooped and had to stop. On Monday morning I did divide one large cast iron plant clump and spread it out in the middle of the bed. When I was teaching my flute lessons in the afternoon I kept wondering why my back hurt so much!

Saturday September 5, 2009

Today Anna and I planted a bunch of transplants. First I sank a bunch of clay pots in the ground for sub-irrigation. When I ran out of pots we buried plastic milk jugs with holes punched in them to do the same thing. Next we planted 3-4 transplants next to each water filled pot. The water will seep out and keep the soil around the buried pots moist. We planted broccoli, cabbage, and brussel sprouts. If you have been reading this you will wonder why I planted broccoli again. Well the first broccoli I planted from seed never came up! I think my seed is too old.

We also harvested some okra and squash today.

Sunday August 30, 2009

Our Okra just started blooming a few days ago, and already we have large pods that need to be picked. This is something that you have to check every day. I happen to be the only one in the family that likes okra, so I didn't plant very much. This morning I was searching for okra recipes and came across an indian recipe for marsala stuffed okra. We will have to try that one.

In addition to the okra, we have been picking green peppers, yellow squash, butternut squash, and lima beans. The lima beans that I rescued in the spring from the ants and aphids lived all this time and produced a bumper crop. It was fun shelling them all and having a meal of the best tasting, tender limas we had ever had.

The pumpkin vines have grown truly enormous, but still no pumpkins!

Wednesday August 5, 2009

Today Anna helped me rip out all the old plants from the spring garden to make way for the fall stuff. Its hard to rip out stuff that is still alive, but I really dont think it will produce anything more. We left the old squash as it has started producing again, and the old tomatoes, peppers and lima beans. Remember the lima beens that the ants tried to destroy? Well they are doing great and producing some beans.

Most of the old stuff was so full of spider-mites that I just stuffed them in black garbage bags and threw them away. I felt creepy after touching them and had to wash up really well!

What I have in the garden right now is:

Tomatoes, peppers, yellow squash, butternut squash, patty pan squash, pumpkins, okra, lima beans. I have planted seeds of broccoli and cabbage, and will soon plant cucumbers, then all the greens at the end of the month. I could also plant corn and potatoes, but I wont.

Saturday August 1, 2009

I officially started planting fall cool weather crops! Today I planted about a row of three different kinds of broccoli, and about 1/4 of a row of cabbage.

We had two inches of rain this week! The garden looks pretty good except for all the old spider-mite ridden beans that I haven't pulled up yet. Note to self - its not worth it to try and tide most plants over from spring to fall. The squash I planted in the spring is still looking great and started producing again though. I am questioning if it was worth it to water them while they were not producing. I dont know?

Most of the new pepper plants were eaten by something. Either cut worms or pill bugs. I only have three new pepper plants left. If I had remembered to put cut pieces of drinking straw around their stems, and had shaded them from the west, it probably would have been alright. I do have 4 old pepper plants that are still producing though.

Tuesday July 14, 2009

The last couple of weeks have been blazing hot! In the last 12 days it has been over 100 degrees 9 times. Yesterday it was 104! Needless to say I am struggling to keep everything watered and alive. The Laundry room water has been a great help in this, plus the 1/2 rain that filled 4 rain barrels. Most everything is doing alright, except the tomatoes which usually dont survive this time of year anyway.

I am in the process of getting the fall garden planted with new tomatoes, peppers. and various squash. Most everything has taken the heat just fine except for the new tomato transplants - they were wilting badly every afternoon even with good water. My solution for that was to rig card board shades on the west sides of their tomato cages. I simply cut up some cardboard and used clothespins to attach them to the west side of the cages. This way the tomatoes get shade in the hottest part of the afternoon.

I am happy with what I have been learning in the water conservation area. What with rain barrels, grey water, and sub-irrigation pots I have drastically reduced my usual water bill, while actually doing a better job of keeping everything happy.

Wednesday July 1, 2009

I have scavenged all my old clay pots to convert them into subsurface irrigators. I wasn't using the clay pots for anything since, over the years, I have realized that in this heat clay pots just let too much water evaporate due to their porosity. This makes them good subsurface irrigators though. I cleaned up the pots, plugged the bottom hole with silicone, buried them, and filled them with water. The water will slowly leach out and water the plant planted next to them.

I am currently planting some of my fall garden plants around these, and will see how they do. I am planting pumpkin, squash and cantaloupe right now, and am getting ready to plant tomatoes and peppers. I am still harvesting tomatoes, beans, squash, cucumbers, and bell peppers.

The water barrel under the laundry room window is finished and catching laundry water. It is so hot and we really need this water!

I am doing very little weeding due to the heavy mulch I put down.

Friday June 25, 2009

I finally made compost!!! See my post about it here.

In addition to that I have been experimenting with water conservation methods, and picking produce. We have a potato beetle problem that I hope wont kill everything off. Apparently the larvae feed on plant roots. It's too hot to spray the plants. Around here it's sometimes hard to keep everything alive in July and August since it gets so hot. It's already getting over 100 everyday.

We can plant things for a fall garden though, and try to keep those alive in the heat.

My worms and BSF larvae are still alive and wriggling - so far so good.

Monday June 15, 2009

Harvested strawberries, tomatoes, dill seed.

Planted lavender.

Set out Safer Brand Fire Ant bait, and Garden Safe slug bait, both are non-toxic.

Snipped strawberry runners.

Messed with worms and BSF Larvae.

Saturday June 10, 2009

Planted okra, pumpkins, cantaloupe.

Picked strawberries, tomatoes, green beans.

Went to a worm composting class with Anna! We now have a plastic worm bin and 1/2 lb. of worms!

Friday June 9, 2009

I spent most of the day making a homemade Black Soldier Fly composter/pod. I used a left over 10 gallon bucket equipped with a screw on lid, a piece of old garden hose cut in half length wise for the ramp, and two old jars for the compost tea collector and the self harvesting container, and more garden hose for all the connections. I used Garry's hand auger to drill 3/4 and 1" holes for ventilation and connections. I will post a picture when it is all done.

Planted a few more transplants, basil, thyme and chamomile, in the herbal tea bed.

Continued to renew the mulch in flower beds. We have run out of mulch from our tree.

Wednesday June 10, 2009

Today it is too wet to work in the garden. We got three inches of rain last night and this morning, and the rain barrels are all full. I wish we had more barrels! My wonderful husband brought home something yesterday call, "Texas Guide to Rainwater Harvesting. Texas Water Development Board in Cooperation with the Center for Maximum Building Systems." I cant wait to read it. This is funny since he came home to the weather sirens going off due to a tornado/hail warning and we had to go down in the storm shelter. Read about it in the post "Almost a Tornado."

Tuesday June 9, 2009

Transplanted borage, basil, fennel and dill to the herbal tea garden.

Made a huge list of garden chores and put it up in the house. The girls are supposed to check it in the morning and pick something to help me with each day. They put their initials by chores they have done. Now I have to think up some reward. ; )

Claire picked deadheading some flowers, and Anna helped me with the transplants. Then I taught Anna how to train and prune the various vines in the vegetable garden (cucumbers, tomatoes and squashes.)

Today I discovered black soldier fly larvae in my compost. (Yes the compost in the rolling barrels finally started working.) After doing research on the web I got so excited! People actually raise these things in bins (like worms) and they make great chicken, fish and reptile feed! I am definitely getting into this, so stay tuned. Now I am more than ever eager to get some chickens, and my old excuse for not letting Anna have a pet lizard is gone (I dont like spending good money for crickets.) I dont have to spend money on the lizard either - she catches them all the time!

Saturday June 6, 2009

The last couple of days were spent just enjoying my garden and pulling a few weeds here and there. Garry put up some tall stakes for me to train the tomatoes on. Thank you! We tackled bermuda grass in the new paths. I finished reading "Ruth stouts No Work Garden book."

Today I harvested the rest of the carrots and onions. The carrots were the best ever - wish I had planted more of them. Now that the garden is bigger I will be able to plant a bigger fall crop.

I also renewed my attack on the ants and put out more homemade ant killer.

My baby herbs are doing fine and I am starting to harden them to more direct sunlight. I will plant them soon.

Wednesday June 3, 2009

It is such a lovely day today! Here it is 2:00 in the afternoon and it is only 81 degrees out side. We worked in the garden all morning long, off an on, right up 'til noon, because it was so cloudy and cool. The only thing that stopped me was that I pooped out : (

I finished weeding the rose bed and reapplying the mulch. Hopefully the job is done for the summer. I'll just keep throwing on mulch if weeds appear.

Claire weeded a gravel path, a difficult job, and Anna weeded and expanded her Iris bed.

I mulched the 40' row that is now empty of onions. That was a lot of work shuttling the mulch around from a pile to the garden, as opposed to opening up store bought bags. But the mulch is free - unless you count how much we paid having the tree cut down : (

I worked on training the tomatoes, cucumbers and squash - a perplexing job I am just learning.

After that Anna and I braided all the onions we have pulled up so far. That was fun. I have a picture of them in the blog called Braiding Onions. We hung the onions up in the pantry/laundry room.

Doesn't seem like much, but I am really tired!

Tuesday June 2, 2009

The rain kept me from doing anything in the garden this morning. The storm was pretty spectacular though and we got about an inch of rain. Instead of working at home we took a little trip to our Pastor's house to visit with Marlene. Marlene showed us her Easter Egg Chicks (we hope to adopt a few). The grown rooster was gorgeous! Marlene also raises meat goats and goat dogs. We got a tour of all her ingenious automated devices for watering and feeding- she is a wiz at concocting things to suit her purposes. Way to go Marlene! Marlene gave me lots of advice, especially about all the things you can make out of wire stock panels! I am now "hatching" a plan to make a chicken tractor out of one 16' stock panel.

Monday June 1, 2009

Got up very early and weeded the Rose bed. I reapplied mulch which was thinning.

Anna got up and helped me dig up bermuda grass in the vegetable garden extension area. We cleaned up the area, moving all the various heavy composting trash cans over to a new spot, moved a bunch of bricks and cinder blocks, and raked wood chips all over so no bare soil shows now. In a few weeks it will be time to start putting in the second season garden plants.

We found two garter snakes and one lizard. Anna had fun playing with them. The lizard was the same leopard gecko that lost it's tail last time Anna found it. It's tail had already grown back a quarter of an inch! The tail was not spotted like the rest of him and was a different color, so we could tell it was new. We played a hide and seek game where the lizard crawled all over Anna, while I tried to look at it. It was always just going around one corner of her as I was going around the other! If I stopped, it would peek around her shoulder at me. Anna is a good sport.

We dug a trench and set in an 8 foot long board along one side of this garden extension to baffle the bermuda grass. Of course I will be the one that gets baffled by the wilily grass!

We played around rolling the compost barrels that had been freed from the termite ridden stand along the ground. This was fun and much easier than rotating them on the stand. I am going to leave it like this.

By 10:30 we were done and we sat in the shade and looked at the flowers. It was only 82 degrees by this time today.

Sunday May 31, 2009

Claire was feeling poorly so I stayed home from church with her.

I wasn't going to do any "work" in the garden, but I couldn't help noticing...

The Ants were eating my baby Red Bud again. I reapplied the kaoline clay band-aid which had washed off in the pouring rain a few days ago. Once again worked like a charm.

Of course I noticed that the rain had washed off all the clay from the peach tree. No, I wasn't going to spray the tree while all my good brethren were at church! However, I did dab a bit on that happened to be left over from the ants (spraying's easier.)

I wandered around "looking" at things, and refilled all the bug traps with water. Why do the bugs all go into the trap already filled with dead bugs? You would think it would be a "dead" give away ; )

I checked the ant bait I had put out in pill bottles. Boy ants are dumb! There is a pile of dead ants in the bottle and around, but the ants are still going in there. (Ants may be "dumb" but they sure have got us beat!)

I noticed two big empty pots sitting there all forlorn. What they really wanted was fennel seeds, so I obliged.

I also notice a Rosemary plant that wanted to be planted in the big pot next the the iron bench, so I obliged it, and also the peppermint seeds that wanted to be planted in the big pot's partner on the other side of the iron bench.

But Really now Garden, that's enough, its Sunday morning!

Time to go in when its 90 degrees in the shade at 10:00 in the morning.

Saturday May 30, 2009

Weeded here and there.

Claire weeded the Iris bed (this is never mulched so... weeds : )

Anna helped me harvest 88 onions that had fallen over. They are drying in the shade of the front porch waiting for me to braid them and hang them in the laundry room.

Tied up a squash to the trellis.

Pruned a few tomatoes. Lots of fruit is setting!

Anna and I pulled up all the spinach and lettuce that was bolting. Ate the spinach and threw the lettuce in compost.

Everyone helped mulch the new herb garden with our dear departed tree's wood chips.

I redesigned the new herb garden layout, as its real self differed from my "plan."

Started some more herb seed.

Cooled off in the shade under the Cucumber trellis. There was a wonderful cool breeze!

Read " Ruth Stout's No Work Garden Book" for a few hours. Fabulous!

Did garden research on the net.