Broken Garden Hose? Learn how to fix your leaking garden hose in this Fix a broken hose video. We’ve run over the garden hose with a lawnmower a few times, and instead of throwing out the hose, we fix the leak in the hose, or the cut off end of the hose with a few repair parts from the hardware store. A few things to keep in mind with garden hose repair, don’t buy cheap repair parts or hose washers, you get what you pay for in most of the world , and this applies in the garden hose fix it department too.
Rubber or flexible washers go between your hose and the spray attachments, and keep the water from leaking out the hose. You might try buying a few different kinds of hose washers, as i’ve found some garden hose attachments don’t work with the thicker hose washers. And buy a bunch of them, you’ll save yourself time later when you need them. Hang them near the hose storage hooks or on the wall of your workshop so you can find them quickly. Put them in a drawer and they are lost.
I’ve found a number of hoses in the neighbor’s trash that were easily fixed with a garden hose repair kit, and I saved a bunch of money and kept a fine watering hose out of the landfill.
What do you do to repair your hoses? let us know below:
Priscilla the egg lady joins us to talk about how to grow swiss chard and how to cook swiss chard. Priscilla is using a double row method this year.
Josh Bauer then joins us to talk about what’s it like to go to the Culinary Institute of America and then start your own farm in Florida. You can check out Josh’s farm at his website here.
Here’s a great way to get rid of slugs organically in your vegetable garden. This DIY slug trap was sent to us by Laurel who has slugs on her vegetable plants. Great way of practicing organic slug control.
I enjoy what you do, and love the dogs… Now that strawberries are ripening, there are always slugs. I have a trap that I like, and you might like it too. It’s easy.
Take an empty small coffee can to start. About 1/3 of the way down, drill 3 or 4 holes that measure 3/4 to 1 inch. Spray a little bit of oil on the inside.. Now, bury it, just to where the holes are. Then you pour about 1 inch of beer in the can and top it with the plastic lid.
Voila, a slug trap, with “no chemical or dyes”, just beer. Slugs like beer, they go in and down to eat, but have a hard time getting out because of the greased sides. Have the dirt come up to the hole so it’s easy for the slug to crawl through.
You are like a friend that comes into my house
DIY slug trap
How neat, super simple way to deal with slugs and you get to drink some beer too! Do you have a way to get rid of slugs? Let us know below:
Squash Vine Borer eating your squash, pumpkin, and zucchini plants every year? Squash plants dying? Here’s how to prevent squash vine borers from eating your squash plants. The borer is the caterpillar of the Melittia cucurbitae moth. The moth lays eggs at the base of young squash plants, both winter squash, summer squash, and pumpkins and the eggs hatch and the caterpillar burrows into the stem of the squash plant, eating the plant from the inside out.
How To Prevent & Protect Squash Plants with our how to video:
There are several ways to prevent the squash vine borer from destroying your plants, I’ve heard about wrapping the stem in foil or pantyhose to confuse the moth, or placing a square of aluminum foil around the base of the young plant is said to confuse the moth. I have also seen larvae enter the squash plant farther up the stem, so using foil or stockings may or may not work. There are also commercial sprays to deter the moth.
Borer Prevention
Our borer prevention method we learned from our neighbor Priscilla, who can be heard on these GardenFork Radio episodes on growing heirloom tomatoes. The one good thing about Squash Vine Borers is they have only one egg cycle, so once you get your plants past the egg laying time of the moth, you can relax about your squash plants drying from squash vine borers.
Check out our gardening how-to video on how to prevent Squash Vine Borers from ruining your squash plants. Let us know how you keep the borers from killing your squash plants below:
Here’s simple bird house you can build that is perfect for a parent – child project using simple tools. This kind of birdhouse is used for ledge nesters, these birds are looking for a protected flat surface where they can build nest.
You can use scrap lumber for this project; its a great way to declutter your workshop and do a good deed at the same time.
We need to build birdhouses to provide birds with nesting sites as their habitat is changed by humans. The bird house plan in this how-to video is a ledge nest style birdhouse for birds who would normally nest on an outcropping or a tree limb. The other style of birdhouse commonly built is a cavity nest, its you typical birdhouse, a box with a hole drilled into it.
Not all birds will use a cavity nest, so we build ledge nests too. I put the ledge nest birdhouses under the eaves of our outbuildings, so the bird nest has protection from rain.
Ledge nest is best located under the eave of a roof
These houses need to be put up high, 10 feet high if possible, the birds do not like to be disturbed. We have several near a dusk to dawn outdoor light, and the birds are attracted to the moths that fly around the light, free food right there.
Do you build birdhouses or go birdwatching? let us know below:
I ran across this soaker hose drip irrigation setup in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Using drip irrigation to water a container garden is great, as the soil in containers dry out fast, especially those pots made out of terra cotta. The setup shown in the pictures here is similar to the one we built for our DIY container garden drip irrigation GardenFork video here.
I like how the supply hoses are tucked away, you don’t see them unless you look closely. The supply hose runs around the end of the fencing and into the building, where its hooked up to a water timer. I can’t tell if this is a system the owner bought or they built DIY from hardware store components.
There are brass fittings to connect the soaker hose to the supply lines between each container, which you can source in the plumbing department of your hardware store. The hose used looks like black vinyl, it works well because it disappears visually, I think.
Putting the soaker hose system on a timer is essential, it keeps you from forgetting to water the plants, and it keeps you from over-watering the plants. Overwatering is one of the reasons plants die, one can drown their plants in water, which causes all sorts of fungus and disease.
On the topic of container gardening, here is a good book on that:
I was looking forward to reading Nikki Jabbour’s The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener because my farming apprenticeship had a significant focus on season extension, as the farm is currently going into its twelfth month of continuous harvest. But we were growing in Virginia, whereas Ms. Jabbour has succeeded in maintaining a year-round garden in the more challenging Nova Scotian climate. Because of this, her book achieves its subtitle: How to Grow Your Own Food 365 Days a Year, No Matter Where You Live.
The book is chock full of information, from the basics (timing the seasons and intensive planting) to the complex (building structures to capture and maintain heat). It is comprehensive enough that a relative novice could start with The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener as a valuable resource. A more seasoned grower might be tempted to skip over some familiar-sounding sections, but I would urge you to read cover-to-cover as unique and useful tips are sprinkled throughout the entire text.
The chapter on winter gardening progresses from light protection (like row covers) to using an unheated greenhouse or building your own polytunnel, so a grower in any hardiness zone or variously sized growing space can find techniques to meet his or her needs. The plans to build your own cold frame or polytunnel are easy to follow and call for inexpensive materials. Plus, the chapter motived me with photos of lusciously green vegetables thriving alongside snow and ice.
Like many other gardening books, this one concludes with a crop index. Ms. Jabbour recommends specific cultivars based on cold or heat tolerance or days to maturity and includes an emphasis on vegetable varieties less talked about in other books; for example, Tatsoi has its own entry.
In short: I love this book. It’s a wonderful resource for year-round vegetable growing knowledge and inspiration. Now, if only I didn’t live in a studio apartment!
Aquaponics and Aquaculture How-to has been taking up a lot of Rick’s time. Below Rick tells us what he has learned about how to build an aquaponics system. Eric
The backbone of the inner tunnel is just 1" ID PVC for ribs
I haven’t been around the Gardenfork site very much, been busy in the greenhouse. But for the last few days rain and, particularly, mud has kept me away from the greenhouse, so I thought I’d update you on my progress on the aquaponics project.
Of course, everything is harder and takes way more time than you think it will, so I have not made as much progress as I though I would by now.
4 mil plastic from the Blue Store comes in 20 ft widths on 100 ft rolls, just what I needed.
Last time I wrote that I wasn’t going to build the inner tunnel inside the greenhouse because the winter was so mild here in Tidewater, but I changed my mind.
I’ve got 40 tomato seedlings just sprouting in the spare bedroom at our house, snuggled in and just getting a start in life. And I am already 2 weeks behind in getting the seeds sprouted, so any more setbacks would be devastating.
Clamp-On PVC over tubing to hold plastic to frame and tension the skin. 4 clamps, two per end.
That’s because, as I mentioned previously, this project has to pay. So if this crop craps out, I’m losing much more than 40 seeds; I’ll lose the early crop.
Not only do the tomatoes have to “make,” but they have to be early enough in the spring to demand a higher price at the Farmers Market. Early local tomatoes are worth gold. Late July tomatoes are nearly giveaways. So we decided that it would be pound foolish to not go ahead with the inner tunnel.
inside the inner cover (that's the Dutch Bucket system in the back left, waiting for the tomato sprouts)
I’ll be growing the tomatoes in Dutch Buckets. (I’m working up another post soon explaining how Dutch Buckets work.)
Dutch Buckets (also called Bato Buckets) are something you can do in your house, as long as you have enough light and enough warmth, particularly for tomatoes and peppers.
It’s a flimsy, wobbly affair. It won’t stand a gust and in even moderate heat the ribs will sag. But it’s quick and cheap. I’m using all 1-inch ID PVC in my plumbing, so as the temperature goes up and the inner cover comes down, I’ll be repurposing the PVC to the irrigation system as I expand.
What’s Aquaponics without fish?
The Fish Tank, is another matter all together. Here’s my first try at the platform:
first try at platform
The problem is that I didn’t show this design to anyone before I built it. She, who must be obeyed, took one look at it and said, “why not have the 4x4s tall, to help contain the tank?”
–Doh…
Fortunately, I put it all together with screws so –after another run to the Blue Store– I had some 5 ft long 4x4s for along the outside edges. I also added more of the cement blocks, so that no span is unsupported for more than two feet.
Redone…with the 5 ft supports all around.
Temperature control is important in Aquaponics. And it’s easier…it says here…to warm up a tank than to cool it off. So temperature control of the tank is important. That’s so your fish are comfortable, but most importantly, that so because the bacteria must be comfortable as well.
The key to Aquaponics is the bacteria. You can have all the fish you want and all the plants you want, but they’ll both DIE if the proper kinds of bacteria do not colonize your system or if the bacteria are unhappy.
If it dries off enough so that I can get back there with a truck this week, I’ll deliver the –damn heavy!– 4 x 8 ‘ sheets of 3/4-inch treated plywood for the sides. I’ll put sheets of interior insulation and a fish-safe pond liner inside the tank so it’s water proof. I’ll also band the top, middle and bottom of the tank around the outside of the 4 x 4s.
The finished Fish Tank will be 8 x 8 x 3 ft or 192 cubic feet. That’s about 14,000 gallons of water, which is 5.8 tons of water. Once I finish the fish tank, I’ll start on the grow beds. I’m hoping four 4 x 8 foot to begin with.
Read Meg Stouts excellent blog 3'x5' Aquaponics, on how to build a backyard aquaponics system
My greenhouse aquaponics project (OMG What Have I Done?) has come up in some soon-to-be-published interviews with Eric, so I thought I’d report on my progress…or lack of progress. First of all, the old commercial greenhouse (100 ft by 30 ft by 30 ft high) has been sealed (added side curtains, repaired the fire damage, put up some canvas flap doors on each end (contact local sign and advertising companies for used banners they are throwing away: heavy, hemmed, UV-resistant. Good stuff for temporary fixes.)
I’ve begun seedlings at home under a grow light, mostly tomatoes. I’ve set up a Dutch Bucket hydroponics system (video forthcoming). I’ve given up on the idea of building an inner greenhouse inside the greenhouse (see the writings of Eliot Coleman on winter greenhouse gardening without heat) and instead will drape plastic over existing plants if needed.
Aquaponics – aka aquaculture.
The learning curve is steep, but not daunting. Thanks to GardenFork listener
@CCorbiere who’s offered his considerable experience in fish wrangling and pond design. His knowledge and experience is going to be more than helpful as I get started on the fish side of the equation.
My Bible: Sylvia Bernstein's Aquaponic Gardening: A Step-By-Step Guide to Raising Vegetables and Fish Together
My biggest hurdle seems to be settling on some systems issues, a breed of fish, and –most importantly– trying to start the biologic process in the winter, which is the reason I launched a hydroponics Dutch Bucket system first. Hydroponics is even more “fiddly-fidgety” than aquaponics, but at least you don’t have to try to start bacteria colonies in the cold. I’ll be documenting this process as I go along.
If you need a brief primer on aquaponics you can’t do better than the Flash animations (click the red button to make them work) from EcoFilms Australia: How an Aquaponics System Works. The system demonstrated is the CHOP system (constant height, one pump), which is what I’ll be doing. There is also an excellent animation on the same page about how a Bell Siphon works. (BTW: the Austrailains are way, way ahead of us in aquaculture.)
from Meg Stout's 3×5 Aquaponics & 365 Aquaponics Blogs, excellent how-to building videos
If you are not familiar with aquaponics, here’s a brief description. Think: Closed Loop Agriculture.
You feed the fish (organic feed, if you wish)
the fish poop
you pump the fish water with the poop to the grow beds (what is called a flood and drain system)
the medium (usually gravel, but can be other things) hosts bacteria that convert the ammonia in the poop to nitrites and then another bacteria converts the nitrites to nitrates (plant nitrogen)
plants in the grow beds pick up the nitrogen from the water when the bed floods
the bell siphon (see video link above) drains the bed after a “dwell” time
the draining of the bed draws oxygen down into the beds and the root zone for the plants
the drained water splashes down to the sump, re-oxygenating the water for the fish
the sump water is pumped back to the fish tank with as much splashing as possible to add more oxygen to the fish tank
Repeat
eventually you get a lot of solids built up in your grow bed
so you add compost worms to the beds (which can breath air and water) to reduce the solids to castings, which become compost tea for the plants
Your only input is fish food and water (to top off the tanks).
Of course there is more to it than this, but that’s the gist of it, a closed-loop, sustainable, agriculture system.
How to start an aquaculture farm starts GF Radio today, as Rick has decided to grow vegetables using aquaponics and hydroponics. Aquaculture is a system which uses fish in tanks and plants in trays. Listen as Rick tell us how to start a low cost aquaculture system, aquaponics systems, and aquaponic gardening. The plan is to grow tomatoes in winter with this fish and plant sytem, using available materials.
Rick also tells about a Texas turkey hunt, and why not all wild turkeys taste great. Eric talks about his deer hunting trip to the Catskills in New York State, hunting on NYC watershed land, and why you should have all your permits in order when hunting.
We then move on to highway safety, a recurring subject on GF Radio. Driving too fast or too slow can cause accidents.
If you have an aquaponic garden or an aquaculture setup , we’d like to hear from you, please leave a comment below or email us, always interested in hearing from you all.
A couple of weeks ago Eric and I were talking on Gardenfork Radio about his new DIY Cold Frames video, and I mentioned winter gardening in hotbeds. I’d seen some hotbeds in the garden in Colonial Williamsburg, where they still garden the way colonial people did.
3 feet deep and lined with bricks to hold and distribute the heat.
Hotbed are like Eric’s cold frames with glass on top and all, but deeper. Last weekend we went up to the Williamsburg Farmers Market for their big pre-Thanksgiving holiday market and I took some pictures of their hotbeds to show Gardenfork readers.
What makes hotbeds particularly attractive to the DIY organic gardener is that you get a twofer. First, you use the otherwise wasted heat of composting to get an early start on Spring. Second, you have fresh, finished compost to spread on your garden.
A hotbed needs to have a mass of at least 1 cubic yard to be effective. That’s because what you’re building is a compost pile and compost needs mass to really cook. So these beds are deep:
— It helps to line a deep hotbed with plastic sheeting or weed block fabric to aid in cleaning it out in the Spring.
— Layer in browns (cabon): dry leaves, leaf mold, spoiled hay and bedding from a stall.
— Layer in greens (nitrogen): kitchen waste, fresh manure.
Hotbeds are an excellent use for chicken manure as well as horse manure, which can be “seedy” in the compost otherwise. Cattle manure is good too.
If done right, enough heat will be generated to kill all seeds, worm eggs, and pathogens. In fact, hotbeds have been known to combust and smolder if too big. Obviously, you don’t put compost worms into a hotbed to help with the composting unless you want them to cook.
add 12 inches of rich growing soil onto the top of the fresh manure.
— Add about 12 inches of good soil for growing.
— Carefully manage your glass frames so that your plants don’t overheat.
Hotbeds are an ancient method of sprouting seeds and growing plants during the winter, Aristotle mentions the Egyptians using compost piles to sprout seedlings. Europeans imported hotbeds from Arab countries after the Crusades.
In fact, the colder and more sunless your winters, the more hotbeds will help you get an early start on the spring garden and bridge what was called in early colonial America the Starving Time, January to March, after harvest stores from the previous fall had run out but before plants would grow in the frozen fields.
Hotbeds don’t have to be buried, either. The Romans had hotbeds on carts so that they could be moved under cover when it rained. In medieval Europe, hotbeds were frequently just dung heaps that people planted vegetables into over the winter.
Manage your hotbeds like a coldframe. Overheating is as dangerous to your plants as freezing.
But regardless of how you build your hotbed, proper timing is important. Few plants or seeds can tolerate the intense heat of an early hotbed. So start your hotbed a month or two before you plant. So plan to plant or seed on the backside of this period, when the hotbed is warm but not hot.
And remember, you have to manage the moisture content of your hotbed, just like a compost pile; neither too wet nor too dry.
And when you hear on the news that a place is a “hotbed of political activity” you’ll know what they’re full of. ;->
You’ve signed a two-year lease on what? Have you taken full-moon-French-leave of your senses…again?
I can tell…She, Who Must Be Obeyed, is intrigued with the idea of my going into business for myself.
“Well…technically I’m extending my Melissa Bee Farms business into new areas, opening new markets, joining the green revolution,” I counter. “Besides, last year we both agreed I needed a bigger beeyard. I’m outgrowing the backyard. I’ve got plans! ambitions! projects! I need ROOM.”
“And MONEY, lots of money. Besides, WHAT bee business? You mean that expensive soup kitchen for bugs-in-a-box, that bee business? Businesses make money; you’ve got another expensive hobby, not a business.”
“Reminds me, I need to pick up another 20 pounds of sugar for syrup,” making a note in my iPad.
“Again? Already…?”
“er….want to see some pictures of the new project, she’s a beaut?”
And so it begins. Secretly, I know She, Who Must Be Obeyed, is right: I’m in over my head…way over my head. The tape in my head is looping: Oh, My God – What Have I Done? I feel a bit sick and a little panicky. It’s put-up or shut-up.
So, what should I do with this green house? (Yeah, I got some space for a beeyard in the bargain.) The owner’s still clearing it out, but it’s mine for two years. That’s two years of lease payments, two years of electricity payments, two years of water payments, two years of buying supplies and materials. I have to make this pay…and I don’t have a clue.
Sure, I’ve been through the Master Gardener classes and I can talk a good game. I grow a pretty good vegetable garden, but what do I know about Growing for Market? Running a green house? Hydroponics? Aquaponics? Marketing?
I need your help. I need reading resources, web sites, advice, suppliers, ideas. If you’ve got experience growing for market, chime in.
First order of business, making it weatherproof. First freeze is predicted for tonight.
Last fall I helped a neighbor dig a bunch of potatoes, and we were given a few bushel baskets of potatoes for our efforts. The potatoes were pretty darn simple to harvest, as the garden soil was nice and loamy, it dug easily with a garden fork. The hardest part was not hitting the potatoes with the fork, there were so many of them.
I took our part of the potato harvest and put it in bushel baskets in the basement. I didn’t clean or was the potatoes before storing them, I think its best to leave them caked in dirt for the winter. Pretty neat to be able to walk into the basement to pull our of a basket some dinner.
It ended up we didn’t eat all the potatoes we had harvested, and this spring, I noticed pale sprouts coming out of the bushel basket, aiming for the basement window.
Found this in the basement..
I wasn’t sure what to do with the sprouting potatoes, as I hadn’t planned on growing potatoes this year. Last time we grew them, we had the Colorado Potato Beetle Invasion, watch the video here. Then this weekend I decided to put them in the garden. If you’re wondering how to plant potatoes, its not rocket science, and potatoes are pretty forgiving, which is a good thing, considering I’m the one planting them.
The potatoes had become a tangled mass of sprouted seed potatoes, a giant ball of roots, potatoes, and sprouts.
I dug out part of one of our raised beds, added some time release fertilizer and azomite, a rock powder, and gently planted the seed potatoes.
laying them in the bottom of a raised bed
As I covered the seed potatoes with dirt and leaf mulch, I tried my best to get the potato sprouts to point up thru the soil.
gently covering the potatoes
Not sure what’s going to happen, but I think the potatoes i planted will be good. I’ll mound the potatoes once or twice with mulch or some straw or other compost like material, and I’ll work on the Potato Beetle problem.
Steve and Scott join us today to talk about how the are starting a homestead, what they are planning to do, and where they are getting good information on homesteading. Their homestead will be in Northern California. Scott has a fun blog called Holy Crap I’m A Hippie, and Steve produces several podcasts at the Farm Cast Network site. The books we talked about on our how to homestead show include Build It Better Yourself, which is out of print, but you can find them for sale used.
In the Gardenfork version of Car Talk, Mike talks about replacing the spark plugs, We update Tyler’s Storm Chasing, How to Make Donuts and Doughnut Recipes and we talk about when your food is expired. Your Food Will Tell You When Its Old says a GF viewer.
Eric talked about Gabfire Themes who have a new restaurant wordpress theme.
Call us 860-740-6938 Eric talks with Rick about how to start vegetable seeds, seed starting, grow lights, and how to avoid damping off of seedlings, broadcast seeding of mesclun and lettuces, what kind of fluorescent bulbs to use in your grow light. Plus more than you want to know about Rick’s crawl space and the problems with pouring a slab foundation in sandy soil. Plus a follow up to our How to Deal with a Contractor talk, with Rick playing the role of the customer, and Eric as the contractor. And a few of Rick’s favorite podcasts.
Want a weed free garden? Learn how to prevent weeds in your vegetable garden as we tour our neighbor’s vegetable garden where they use a weed barrier fabric and get great results.
You can buy this plastic mesh weed fabric online or at a local greenhouse supply. This fabric was sewn together by a neighbor to create a large wide piece of fabric that is rolled up at the end of the year and stored in the garage. You get what you pay for with this material. Make sure it is UV stable. You can see how the fabric has held up in our natural weed control update video.
As you can see in the above photo, if you just cut the mesh, it will fray eventually. Using a torch to make holes for planting works much better.
Some people have asked about crop rotation, and this weed fabric holes have been created such that if you rotate the big piece of fabric, the holes will be in a different place each year. So you are not planting in the same place every year. This has worked well for our neighbors.
Each spring they till in a time release fertilizer and then pull the weed fabric across. It is anchored down with cement blocks along the edges and bricks in between rows of plants.
You do get a few weeds peeking out of the plant holes, but this is so much easier than pulling weeds out of a open soil garden. Keeps your clothes a lot cleaner too.
The fabric is not great for planting salad greens or bulb plants like beets or onions, though you could lay narrow strips of this between the rows to keep down weeds. I’ve found its best for transplants or large seed plants like squash, peppers, tomatoes, etc.
Have you used weed barrier fabric or do you have another weed free garden tip? Let us know below and thanks for watching!
There are brass fittings to connect the soaker hose to the supply lines between each container, which you can source in the plumbing department of your hardware store. The hose used looks like black vinyl, it works well because it disappears visually, I think.
