Rain barrel

The first rain barrel is in. It's not pretty, but it serves its purpose. The storage container is a 55-gallon, food grade plastic barrel. This one had a previous life as a greek pepper container and still had a few errant peppers in it when we got it. We added a hose bib fitting about 6" from the bottom and a fitting for attaching to another barrel about 6" from the top. The center part of the threaded top of the barrel was cut out. The lid was then fastened back on with a piece of screen to keep bugs and leaves out. I placed a grill on the top to keep cats, squirrels, opossums, etc. from falling through the screen. The whole thing sits under one of the downspouts from the rain gutter, which was cut to the correct height. The barrel sits up on concrete blocks to add a little extra vertical height.

We got all the parts from the Indigo green store, here in Gainesville, and even attended a class where they supplied all the parts and we constructed the barrels as a group. The construction of these barrels is so simple, we would not have had any problem with it ourselves. But finding all the parts, especially the barrels would not have been easy at all. This store is a fantastic resource for us here in North Central Florida for any kind of green building or household products.

The barrel is about 2 feet vertical and 40 feet horizontal from the square foot garden. We had our first rain early this morning and it worked in principal, with a few minor glitches. (1) The downspout had not been riveted back together (yet) and it came apart. OK, need to finish the job. (2) There is a small leak at the hose bib. Again, easily fixed with a little caulk. (3) And the rate of gravity drainage is very slow. There is not nearly enough pressure to supply a sprinkler, so hand watering was necessary. And it took over an hour to drain the barrel, which was about half full. There are a couple of potential fixes here. First, we will put the barrel up on another set of blocks for a little extra height. And second, we need to work on a distribution method so watering can be done without physically sitting there with the hose. A slow system would not be so bad then.

This barrel is much too small to get all of our irrigation from it. But it's a start. We will add at least two more barrels at the other two downspouts from the house, but only if we can figure out a camouflage method for the one which will have to sit at the front of the house. We could also connect multiple barrels together at the same downspout. The system should work well for our small gardens for most of the summer growing season, when we have generally reliable rainfall which will refill the barrels and reduce the demand for irrigation. The barrels will probably be inadequate for the winter garden, when we can go weeks without any rain.

SF Garden -- Late Winter Update

We have been harvesting some beautiful and delicious carrots from the garden. My one cabbage plant is gorgeous! I suppose I could harvest it at any time, but I think I'll let it go a bit longer. The lettuce is pretty much all gone now. I left one plant for seed production. The beets are still pretty little but I pulled a few of them yesterday. And there's peas, onions, chard, and strawberries still to come.

Now for the broccoli story. Last family dinner night, I decided to pick the one big brocolli stalk and give everyone a bit of raw veggies fresh from the garden before dinner as appetizer. We all tasted it and politely declared it good. But soon it became apparent that the aftertaste left something to be desired. It was a bit bitter, maybe coppery even. A few minutes later, Erica noticed little green things on her computer keyboard. She had been working on homework when I brought the brocolli in. It turns out the brocolli was covered with camoflauged tiny bugs. Live and healthy. And coppery tasting. I learned my lesson -- always wash the veggies, even if you grew it organically yourself. I check the garden almost daily and completely missed this pest. I went out and sprayed some Safer insecticidal soap on the brocolli plants, so I hope that takes care of the little buggers! I'll be checking a little more carefully from now on.




We've had some really cold nights this year. It's gotten below freezing on four separate occasions, and once down into the teens. To protect the plants, we place wire tomato cage supports around the edges of the raised beds. Then we place clear plastic over the frames and hold it down with spare 4x6's left over from making the raised bed. This has worked really well, but would not be the best in high winds or heavy rainfall. We generally wait for the front to go thru before setting up the "greenhouse". It's cheap, easily assembled, and easily stored between bouts of cold weather. We have been toying with various ideas for a more permanent-type greenhouse, but for the number of days that we actually need cold protection here in North Florida, this works just fine.

Garden Update

We have been harvesting lettuce and carrots! Until today, the carrots have not made it into the house because I eat them straight from the garden. But tonight we will have a salad with lettuce and carrots, just hours old.


The beans, of course, did not survive the first freeze. I should have known. But when it's 90 degrees out and I'm planting a garden in my bathing suit so I can cool off in the pool when it gets too hot, it's hard not to think of warm weather plants.


The lettuce, carrots and beets are doing great. We also have some spinach, chard, onions, broccoli and cabbage that look good, but are not ready for harvest yet. Since the last garden update, I have planted some more lettuce and carrot seeds. And I bought some chard seedlings and transplanted them. I also bought a cabbage seedling. That's been a while, and the plant looks great.


So far everything in the garden is organically grown. I am not morally opposed to using inorganic fertilizers, if needed. Nitrogen is nitrogen, as far as the plant is concerned. But the soil is healthier if it contains enough organic matter. And the right proportions of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus can supply all the nutrients necessary for growth.

Fall Garden

I hear that fall gardening is the way to go in Florida. This is the first time I've attempted it, but so far most everything looks pretty good. At least when I get a chance to see it. With the shorter days, it's getting dark by the time I get home from work. So some evenings I'm doing flashlight gardening. But there are flowers on the bean plants. The nasturtiums are getting huge. The beets that recovered from the bad rain last month look great. Carrots are looking good. Lettuce is healthy. The only things that really didn't make it are the swiss chard (something gnawed on it), one of the brocolli's (ditto) and the sorrel (never did germinate).

Days are short, the sun is low and temperatures are cooler, so the plants are growing much more slowly than in a spring/summer garden. But the biggest difference that I've noticed between this fall garden and summer gardens is the relative lack of bugs. I've had to pick some eggs and caterpillars off the bean plants, but I really haven't noticed any other bugs (other than whatever ate the chard and brocolli). We did have a fire ant infestation in one corner of the raised bed. I dug them out, taking a few of the carrot plants with them, but they seem to be gone for good now. I'm not sure if they crawled over the border wall or burrowed under.

With the sun lower in the sky now, and most of the leaves still on our trees, the hours of sunlight have really been reduced. By December we will have lost all of the sweetgum leaves and some of the hickory leaves. The live oak and laurel oak leaves will stay on all winter and drop in the spring when the new leaves emerge. I'd like to measuer the solar radiation that this garden gets. It seems very limited, but so far the plants are healthy, so I suppose it is enough.

Can't wait to start the harvest! That will be the true test!

Harvested this week from the summer garden:

Peppers (habanero, poblano and tangerine), and four acorn squashes. Some of the habeneros went into a peanut soup tonight. The squashes are for our Thanksgiving squash soup.

First blood

Only three weeks in and already I'm getting pests. The beans were first. I guess that's appropriate since they were the first to emerge. I don't know the names of pests and I should have taken a picture before I squashed them into their ancestors. But these little worms bite out two small cuts from the edge of the leaf and perpendicular to it. Then they fold the leaf over on themselves for protection. Very clever. Here's a picture after I removed the bugs.

I'm also seeing some leafminers on some of the bean and cabbage leaves. Not sure what to do about that as the pests aren't available to squash like worms.

Here's a very healthy new leaf triplet from one of the bean plants. I picked some eggs off this one, presumably the same pest species that were eating the older leaves.

Last weekend I replanted some of the plants that did not germinate: a couple lettuces, spinach, sorrel, chard, turnip, and one black bean. Still waiting to see the germination rate this time around. I think that maybe I should have started the seeds indoors in June. Then they would have had a bit of a headstart. A week ago Thursday we got a frog-strangler rain that nearly wiped out the tender new seedlings. We got about 2 inches of rain in 45 minutes. The beets were battered; the carrots, creamed; the spinach, splattered...

But most plants seem to have recovered. All in all, the garden looks pretty good.

Garden update

One week later, most plants have emerged in the square foot garden. I planted 2 small sage plants, a cabbage plug and an established pepper plant, but all the rest are from seeds. The black tepary beans came up overnight and are already getting big enough that we need to think about getting the trellis ready.

The little photo above is a nasturtium sprout, planted 4 seeds per sqaure foot. Below are beets at 16/sf with spinach (4/sf) in the square behind them.

For lack of something more suitable, I used plastic knives as labels for each sqaure.

List of plants in east box:

• 4 nasturtiums
• 1 sorrel
• 16 beets
• 4 lettuce (2 squares)
• 16 carrots (2 squares)
• 4 spinach
• 4 marigold
• 1 chard
• 16 onions (2 squares)
• 1 brocolli (2 squares)
• 1 sage (2 squares)

List of plants in west box:

• 4 marigolds
• 4 spinach
• 4 turnips
• 4 lettuce
• 1 chard
• 16 beets
• 1 sorrel
• 16 carrots
• 4 nasturtiums (2 squares)
• 1 brocolli
• 16 onions
• 1 cabbage
• 4 black tepary beans (2 squares)
• 1 poblano pepper

A new garden

I'm not a bad gardener. Really. It's just that I've had to deal with not enough sun (I like my trees), marginal soils (sand underlain by clay), not enough time (working mom), etc... But it was time to ramp up my efforts. Take it to the next level.

Last year my husband, Wendell, bought me Mel Bartholomew's book "Square Foot Gardening". At first, I kind of dismissed it as being a nice idea, but probably not something I would do. But after thinking about it, it seemed to combine a lot of my philosophies about gardening: lots of variety in a small area, minimal upkeep, organic methods. So I thought we should give it a try.

The method involves building a raised bed using a mix of peat moss, compost and coarse vermiculite. No native soils -- start from scratch. So we went down to our local recycled building supply store and found some fantastic 4x6 tongue and groove cedar framing members. We bought enough to construct two 4'x4' planter beds that share one common wall. The idea behind the 4'x4' bed is so that all parts of the garden can be reached without walking on, and therefore compacting, the soil. So the two beds, although they are connected, are staggered so that all areas are reachable from the sides.

Finding the peat moss was easy -- any garden supply store sells it. Coarse vermiculite was supplied by my son's girlfriend, Crystal, who works at a garden supply store in Gainesville. I searched high and low for a local source for compost. I compost all of our vegetable scraps from the kitchen and much of our leaf litter from the yard, but I had no where near the 9 cubic feet of compost needed for this project. But the smallest amount of compost that I could buy from a local source was 1 cubic yard. So I ended up buying the bags of Black Kow compost that are sold at Home Depot. It's not certified organic, but it is good quality and all that I could find in our area.

Each 4'x4' box is divided into 16 squares, each to be planted with a different crop. Depending on the size of the plant, each square will be planted with 1, 4, 9, or 16 seeds. Broccoli, for instance will have only one plant per square, but onions can be planted up to 16 per square. Our 12" squares are delineated with screw-eyes threaded with nylon string.

The pavers around the perimeter are so that we can mow around the boxes. We still need to build a support on the north end for the climbing bean plants. Maybe next week.

Materials list for boxes:

• 4"x6" Cedar framing members: ~70 LF
• Angle braces: 16
• Screw eyes: 24
• Nylon string
• Newspaper underneath the boxes for weed suppression
  
• An inch or so of sand to hold the newspapers down (~2.5cf)

Materials list for fill

• Coarse vermiculite: 2 bags (~3.5 cf ea.)
• Black Kow composted manure: 8 - 50 lb bags (~1 cf ea.)
  
• Peat moss: 4 - 2 cf bags
• Homemade compost: ~2 cf

Materials list for border

• sand: ~8 bags
• 16"x16" pavers: 24
• 4"x8" pavers: 28

I have not added up the total cost of this project. Some of the materials we had just lying around, like most of the paver blocks. Whatever the final cost, it will take many, many gardens to break even economically. But that's not really the point of gardening, is it?