Well, I thought I was going to post about our new watering system in the vegetable garden. It uses a drip hose and is set with a timer. I had been noticing that the tips of the onions were getting yellow and started googling. Well, of course they said lack of water even though I thought I'd been watering enough by doing it twice a day, maybe it wasn't enough. So David went and installed this lovely irrigation system.
As we kept watering we noticed underneath our garden that there was too much water coming out. After further analysis our tarp that is under everything was leaking out too much of the water. So we had a plan A and a plan B.
Plan A was to install another more durable tarp and pull it through by taking the sides off. David then used a rope and fed it through while pulling. Well it went about half way and was starting to rip and we knew that wasn't going to work. I was too nervous to even take pictures of this. Plan B wasn't going to be pretty.
Here you can see the tips of the onions that are yellowish.
You can see the drip hose in action. It works really well and we hope to use it again at some point.
I figured we had to try to save the garden and we couldn't do much more damage since if we did nothing the garden was going to die anyway. We had to transplant each individual plant into small cups and take ALL the dirt out and put the new more durable tarp underneath. Then we had to put the dirt back in, the wood grids back on and replant all the plants.
This took place about 9:30pm last night. David did most all the work, I just cut the cups and told him what had to be planted where. Now, this probably has a 5-10% chance of working. I have no idea what damage we did be taking them out and putting them back in. We tried to dig so far under each plant not to disturb the roots. All we can do is hope for the best and if not, we learned some valuable lessons. I'll give it a few more weeks before I post on lessons learned. I will keep you updated, but my dream of luscious vegetables might be squashed until next season. I know I can go to home depot and use their plants that are already grown, but that defeats my purpose of starting from scratch and I already invested enough money into this. Cross your fingers!
5 comments:
hey jen! it's leah's friend sara. :) as long as you continue to water heavily for a few days and then consistently after that, i have a feeling a lot of them will be totally fine. it's normal to replant things, like when you thin them out, so give it some time. i bet most things will do great!
oh no!! Your dreams aren't squashed yet... I'm sure you'll get some veggies after all!
I'm curious, you're so cost conscious that I'm sure you have good records. How much has the project cost? Even without the set back, with water as costly as it is for irrigation, I just can't see how a garden would be cost effective. But could be wrong! As a hobby or to try it out and have fresh, pesticide free veggies, sure! Our problem is we tried tomatoes a few times and when they did grow, squirrels ate them, or just knocked them down and dug into them. Doesn't seem worth all the time and effort and cost, unless of course it's something someone enjoys doing.
Thanks Sara for the encouragement! I'll let you know how it goes. We've been watering and hoping that they will come back to life.
Chris, for me it is more of an enjoyment/hobby thing. I really enjoyed the research and planning process of the gardening. I learned what grew well next to each other and what to plant far away from each other. David enjoyed the building and construction of it. We both love to see what grows. We wanted to do it all from seeds so it was more exciting to see grow. The total cost was $140. $60 for building materials, $35 for seeds, and $45 for dirt mixture. Next year we will spend almost nothing, but maybe a little more dirt. We literally used 3-4 tiny tiny seeds per hole and it comes with 50-100 seeds in a packet so we have saved them carefully for next year. I just want to grow fresh vegetables and go outside and pick them.
Cool, thanks for the info...I can dig that. ;)
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