Wow, has May been busy. Running 2 gardens both an hour away from my home (plus training for a marathon in august) makes for one incredibly busy schedule on top of the usual working and family life.
We’ll start with experiments for the front yard this year:
Mini-Greenhouses: I bought 2 of these from Home Depot, they are about 4 feet wide and deep enough to hold a seed tray lengthwise. I can fit 4 seed trays per shelf. I got the shorter 3 shelf version of the greenhouses as they were on sale! In one of them I put an electric heater with a thermostat on it so it keeps the air at a minimum temperature which is really nice since our weather and temperature can be quite erratic. (we got about 30cm of snow in mid april accompanied by a plunge of temperature, all after 3 nice relatively warmer, drier weeks. All of the tomatoes, peppers, ground cherries, and various herbs and flowers in them have now been moved out either into their places in the gardens or into the yard to get full sun and wind.
Lexan Coldframes: I have the prototype assembled for this, and within about 36 hours of initial assembly I discovered the unit decided to be “self-venting” ie, the lexan shattered. I’m pretty sure it was not due to impact damage from the neighbourhood soccer balls, but more think I had the angle of the top curve on the unit to be too much. I’ll be slicing off the broken parts and getting a smaller rectangular piece of lexan to cover the resulting gap.
I have enough material to make another one the same, but will have to change the design a little so nothing shatters. I think I’ll cut the next piece of lexan into 3 and use silicone caulking to fill the 2 cracks, thereby avoiding this first shattering issue I’ve seen. I may even try to find the technical specs on the lexan I bought in case there is a datasheet that has the acceptable bend angles for the stuff. It’s a lot of money to keep breaking those panels at $85 a pop, so I’ll take a few more precautions with the next one.
The final components of this coldframe design are the solar panel, fans, and thermostat which have yet to be wired in and all affixed to the side of the frame. In testing the frame without the electronics, it works pretty well but needs to be tipped up to provide venting space to avoid cooking the plants. The tomatoes living under the frame are currently pretty happy, though 1 of them hadn’t survived the transplant process and got discarded.
Here is a picture of the Coldframe:
I haven’t yet had time to install the thermostat, solar panel, fans & carrying handles, but the plants really like it in there since there was the break in the lexan. I may have it so the replacement piece has the fans embedded in it and hinged to be able to swing down for even further venting.
Raised benches: We have built a raised bench for the various plant containers this year, in order to protect them from the plant-eating lawnmowers brought by the landscapers. So far, it works beautifully and gets the plants that much more sun than if they were sitting at the base of the fence.
Box of compost getting ready for transport
Zucchini hardening off
Supervisory Garden dog!
Here are some pictures of the Mundare garden this year. The only things left to do there now are plant the beets and onions and finish the trellising. We installed a gravity-feed drip irrigation line we bought from Lee Valley Tools and are testing it out this week on my tomatoes and peppers. It looked very promising and had no leaks when we finished installing it. I figure it should take about 2.5 days to drain the barrel it’s attached to…
south east corner view after amending all the soil
west side after applying landscape fabric – am not happy with the brand i bought this year – it lets too much light through and there’s some weeds under it!
looking west
looking southeast before trellising went up
west end of garden
Showing this year’s row spacing, lots of room for wheelbarrow!
Potatoes coming up
Siphoning water to rain barrels, wasn’t working until darren got a mouthful of dead flies from the hose. eww yummy! protein! bleh!
West end of garden, tomatoes visible in middle row.
Cuke row planted and watered
Vine Tomatoes
Bush tomatoes just planted
row of squash
Squash and corn in this row, corn on the far end
Sunscald
Covered tomatoes – they got no windburn. sunscald on the other hand…
Covered Peppers, they like it warm in there
Cuke sprouting
Cuke grown at home
Lettuces just planted
Rain barrel aka garbage can for gravity feed irrigation system test
Potatoes coming up!
Gravity Feed…
Close-up of drip head feeding a tomato plant
Drip heads
Drip line
Drip head
Pumpkin!
Canteloupe grown in the house, hope it survives!
Peas ‘n Beans go here, need to be trellised.
And here is how the Camrose garden is looking:
during cleaning up from winter
during cleaning up from winter
during cleaning up from winter
Onions go here!
Tomatoes with soaker hose line marked
Peas
Cukes
Squash
