A little spring frost protection. Works like a warm winter coat protecting plants down to 24-26 °F

What you need:
2 - 1/2"  PVC pipes (10' pipes)
8 - 1/2" galvanized pipe hangers (two for each end of the pipe, use the ones that you screw on both sides)
4 - 2x4" boards (cut to size from 8' boards)
1 - (9'x15') Frost blanket
16 - 1.25" decking screws
10 - 3" decking screws

Start Planning Your Garden Now

If you want to learn home preservation of food (canning), Think about what specifically you want to preserve. You need to start planning out your year and now is a good time to start thinking about what you want to put in your gardens for canning. If you plan for what you want to can or freeze now, you can plan your garden. If you plan your garden you don't have to buy everything you want to preserve at the store. I'm thinking that once a month would be a good place to start for planning. Every few Saturdays I'll try to post something about planning gardens and canning food.

2010 coming to an end

2010 was a year of more lessons.

sprinklers are still out of whack

 broke the new flat shovel

discovered that bed 6 needs to be moved

did more damage to the lawn by not watering

broke the nice long hose.

dealt with more earwigs (thinking we'll need some professional help to get rid of them)

ran out of time to blog....

harvested lots of tomatoes

got a compost tumbler (hard to keep the compost moist enough to break down)

new trellises never got put up

need more frost blankets

lots of projects still left undone

Planting, Planting, Planting

This weekend we got a little crazy. We bought some miller's gardenbox mix, composted steer manure, and sta-garden soil, tossed it all on a tarp mixed it around, divided it among our 6 beds and raked it into the top 2 inches. So contrary to my last post we did add something to each bed, about 1.5 cuft of mixed soil/compost.

We also bought two Dupont Frost blankets so far I think they are the best early season addition we could have made. the blankets are rumored to protect plants from frost down to 28 degrees and maybe thick enough to protect down to 0 degrees and by sprinkling water over the blanket possibly below 0 degrees.

We shall see how our early season test subjects fair.

We altered some of our plan, and planted almost 2 and a half beds. Peas, blue potatoes, red onions, kohlrabi, Romain lettuce, 4 more tomatoes, and swiss chard.

Still to do:

Fix drip irrigation sprinklers

I think a new sprinkler box and another sprinkler valve to isolate the garden is in order, in addition to the low pressure adaptor

Get a flat nose shovel (got two for a good deal at the DI)

Look into a compost shredder/grinder - considering building one out of an electric mower and 1/2" diamond pattern metal screen

add amendments to garden beds and till the soil (amendments will be delayed until fall or next spring)

spray garden soil with copper soap to kill fungal pathogens (will wait until all plants are planted)

Fill hole to transplant pear tree, 15ft north of current location, with compost and mix with soil.

transplant and prune pear tree

move garden bed 6 20 ft south of current location where there would be more sun (or add one bed and use bed 6 only for shade tolerant veggies like tomatoes and cold weather crops) decision was made to leave to bed at the current location as a test since the apricot tree was felled last summer so there will be more sun then last year.

plant tomatoes and other cold weather plants in wall-o-water's Used all 6 Wall-O-Water's we have

install trellises on the beds

Tilling Garden beds and more

We have been looking at several small tillers to help with getting a better soil blend when adding compost and other soil additives. We like the mantis but think it's a little on the expensive side. The troybuilt 4cycle was also in consideration. but in the end we got lucky and my Father gave us an old ChoreMaster; free is better then a $300-400 expense any day.

So all the beds have been tilled, no compost was added unfortunately. But we decided the seed starts had gotten so large that we just needed to get the beds tilled and start planting. Our tomatoes are nearly 2 feet.

We planted our Broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts with filter fabric as a row blanket, we'll see how this test substitution works.  We also planted 3 tomatoes in wall-o-waters. 

Still to do:

Fix drip irrigation sprinklers

I think a new sprinkler box and another sprinkler valve to isolate the garden is in order, in addition to the low pressure adaptor

Get a flat nose shovel

Look into a compost shredder/grinder - considering building one out of an electric mower and 1/2" diamond pattern metal screen

add amendments to garden beds and till the soil (amendments will be delayed until fall or next spring)

spray garden soil with copper soap to kill fungal pathogens (will wait until all plants are planted)

Fill hole to transplant pear tree, 15ft north of current location, with compost and mix with soil.

transplant and prune pear tree

move garden bed 6 20 ft south of current location where there would be more sun (or add one bed and use bed 6 only for shade tolerant veggies like tomatoes and cold weather crops)  decision was made to leave to bed at the current location as a test since the apricot tree was felled last summer so there will be more sun then last year.

plant tomatoes and other cold weather plants in wall-o-water's

install trellises on the beds

Chipping away at the to-do list

Over the weekend we finally got the pear tree out of it's hole and into a proper hole. No longer does it sit some 6 inches lower then it should. We also enlisted the help of my father-in-law to prune the tree in a traditional centeral leader.

All the beds but one are ready to have compost added and are ready to be tilled.

Still to do:


Fix drip irrigation sprinklers
I think a new sprinkler box and another sprinkler valve to isolate the garden is in order in addition to the low pressure adaptor
Get a flat nose shovel
Look into a compost shredder/grinder
add amendments to garden beds and till the soil
spray garden soil with copper soap to kill fungal pathogens
Fill hole to transplant pear tree, 15ft north of current location, with compost and mix with soil.
transplant and prune pear tree
move garden bed 6 20 ft south of current location where there would be more sun (or add one bed and use bed 6 only for shade tolerant veggies like tomatoes and cold weather crops)
plant tomatoes and other cold weather plants in wall-o-water's
install trellises on the beds

more seeds started

Yesterday we did a seed starting bonanza. close to 80% of the garden is planted for this year. We bought a wire frame rack to put all the plants on for starting, next year we plan to add grow lights to the seed starting system.


still to do,
Fix drip irrigation sprinkelers
I think a new sprinkelerbox and another sprinkeler valve to isolate the garden is in order in addition to the low pressure adaptor
Get a flat nose shovel
Look into a compost shredder/grinder
add amendments to garden beds and till the soil
spray garden soil with copper soap to kill fungal pathogens
Fill hole to transplant pear tree, 15ft north of current location, with compost and mix with soil.
transplant and prune pear tree
move garden bed 6 20 ft south of current location where there would be more sun (or add one bed and use bed 6 only for shade tolerant veggies like tomatoes and cold weather crops)
plant tomatoes and other cold weather plants in wall-o-water's
install trellises on the beds


pictures to come