Why did Mike point his antenna to Milwaukee? You’ll have to listen to this week’s GardenFork Radio to find out. Tyler , CEO of Allison House, joins us. Then we talk about Facebook Privacy, pole beans and peas, sink toilets, insect attractant plants, canning and applesauce, apple butter, and Carbon Monoxide detectors.
On Christmas Day we went out to the garden to take care of what we should have done in the fall. And we made a video about it. How unusual.
I’m a big fan of Eliot Coleman, and his book, The Four Season Harvest. Its full of a ton of information, one of the things that stuck with me is that South of France is on the same parallel, the 44th, as Eliot’s house in Maine. France grows vegetables in the winter, and we don’t. Or most of us don’t. Eliot does grow vegetables in winter. Check out his site here Eliot has a new book out on winter gardening, The Winter Harvest Handbook, which you can buy from your local bookstore or here.
I usually put a cold frame on one of our raised beds to grow cold hard greens in the late fall and early spring. I have yet to master Eliot’s methods of getting greens thru the winter. You can see our video on how to build a cold frame on this page of our site.
Watch this Gardenfork episode for more on plastic mulch, cold frames, and of course the Labradors.
I use this homemade DIY drip irrigation system with soaker hose for my raised vegetable beds. Its easy to build and works great. Watch the video to see our first take on a soaker hose system. If you want to build a simpler version see my video for PVC connected soaker hose system.
The drip irrigation system I built uses copper pipe, which can be expensive, you can also use PVC pipe to build the manifolds that feed the soaker hoses.
I dug a slot into the ground and pushed the garden hose into it to hide the hose feeding each raised bed. This makes lawnmower much easier too, no chance of running over a garden hose that way.
Key to watering your garden with drip irrigation is to not water it too much, i know its fun to watch the water ooze out of the soaker hoses, but you want the beds to dry out a bit between waterings. I water my vegetable beds every 4-5 days. Tomatoes, especially, grow best when the soil dries out between waterings. Too much water is just as bad as not enough water, it makes it easy for fungus and disease to grow.
How long do soaker hoses last? I’ve had these in the ground year round for about 10 years. Some hoses have leaked, but not a lot. And its obvious when they are leaking, and easy to fix. All you do is cut out the leak, and connect the two pieces back together with a piece of pipe.
If the water pressure going into the hoses is fairly low, or if you use an inline pressure reducer attached to the garden hose, you can use cable ties instead of clamps to put the lines together.
Water timers for garden hoses have improved a bit lately, below is one i recommend. Some of these timers are awful to try to program.
Build a simple raised bed with this DIY video. With this raised bed plan we show you how to make raised vegetable or flower beds without using pressure treated lumber The current raised beds in the garden have been there about 8 years now. So we must have done something right. how unusual… If you want to build raised beds, the ones we have are good for vegetables and flowers, check it out, let us know your thoughts.
Our raised beds are 4 feet wide and 12 feet long, make sure the raised beds are 4 feet ( 48″ ) wide on the outside dimension. This will make it easy to use floating row fabrics or plastic sheeting that comes in 48″ wide rolls. I learned this the hard way.
DIY raised bed plan complete
You may want to consider putting 1/2″ galvanized wire screening across the bottom of the raised bed frame before siting it and loading in all the dirt, this will keep out moles and voles. We haven’t had a huge problem with that, but I see how it could for some people.
For our garden soil, we had a delivery from a local nursery that sells a garden soil mix. It can be hard to find a company nearby that sells what you want, you may end up mixing it all up yourself. Let me know how you have built your raised beds below:
Learn here how to start seeds in pots or trays with the experts. In the city we live near the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and they showed us some great seed starting tips. By starting your own seeds, you can get a lot more plants for less money, and you get to grow plants that are not available at your local nursery. neat.
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden uses bark as a seed starting medium. I can’t seem to find that stuff, so i use coir, which is compressed coconut fiber, and mix in vermiculite or perlite to add some air to the mix.
One of the keys i think, is to not have the seeds too wet, over-watering your seed starting trays can cause a bunch of problems and kill the seedlings. Its also important to have the seed trays in direct sun, I use a grow light, you can watch our how to build a grow light video here. Having the seeds in a window will cause the seedlings to get leggy – spindly.
Other GardenFork DIY seed starting videos you may enjoy:
Watch this video on how to grow lettuce, mesclun and salad greens and learn how to harvest salad and lettuce.
Until the heat of summer knocks them down, loose leaf lettuce is one of those low maintenance pleasures of gardening. There are a ton of varieties of lettuces/salad greens (which we’ll go into in future episodes) right now we are growing a bunch of Deer Tongue and Antares, both from Fedco.
Loose leaf lettuces can be harvested and then they grow again. All you do is cut the lettuce about an inch above the soil line with a scissors, and it will grow back. If you plant a few rows every two weeks, you can get lettuce for most of the growing season. With row covers or cold frames, you can harvest lettuce almost year round.
Eliot Coleman, in his book, the Four Season Harvest, writes at length on how to prolong your lettuce growing season.
Robin Follette writes about meeting Eliot Coleman in her Farm & Garden blog
