GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Tag: vegetable gardening

You Need To Know About This Invasive Worm – GFR455

Erin from The Impatient Gardener tells us about the Jumping Worm that is moving its way across the country. Not many have heard about this, myself included, but its not a good thing.

These worms, which hang out on the upper layers of soil, are massive digesters of soil. This is not a good thing. What they leave behind is loose soil resembling coffee grounds and largely devoid of nutrients. Give them a little time and they destroy the composition of the soil to the point where plants are no longer anchored.

They reproduce without mating, laying impossible-to-find cocoons in the soil that overwinter even in cold areas, and oh, by the way, they mature so quickly that two generations can be produced in one season. They do their damage quickly.

Read Erin’s post about the invasive Jumping Worm here.

Photos from Wisconsin Dept of Natural Resources.

December 27, 2017
Vegetable Garden Fails & Successes – GF Video

My vegetable garden fails were pretty obvious this year, and in the video below we give you a garden tour. Watch the vid then read through our thoughts below.

At least the sunflowers and the kale are growing!

The garden heated up quickly this year and I found that any of the greens or mustards that I got as transplants bolted very quickly. I was surprised how quickly they did. Maybe those plants were already stressed in the plant pack trays and I couldn’t do anything about it.

My bed of salad greens, which is the shadiest bed in the yard, turned into weeds. I think the compost I got was full of weed seeds. Boom, a bed of weeds. I think I will use the string trimmer on this bed and then replant.

The sunflowers are doing well. I even transplanted several from the other garden beds. They key to transplanting sunflowers is to dig out a large root ball and water them often after replanting. They also like fertilizer. I did sow the sunflower seed too early, so a lot of them did not germinate. But I re-seeded and that batch has taken off. I made sure to have the taller varieties in the back of the bed. It should be a good cutting garden soon.

The sugar snap peas (watch our how to grow sugar snap peas video here) are doing well. They are just now browning out after a good season of producing lots of Labrador snacks. I tried the Sugar Anne variety with not great success. I really like the Super Sugar Snap peas. You learn how to build the trellises we use in a video here.

Our string beans are just starting to flower. I really like the Rattlesnake Pole Beans I get from Fedco Seeds, or you can save your own string bean seeds. they don’t get stringy or woody and can stay on the vine a few days after ripening. They are on the same kind of simple string trellis we use for the peas.

What are your garden fails? Let me know below. Meantime some more cool posts are below.

Can You Transplant Snap Peas?

Simple Techniques To Garden Almost Year Round In This Book

How To Grow Mushrooms From Plug Spawn – GF Video

July 17, 2017
Pressure Treated Wood For Raised Beds? – GF Video

Can you use pressure treated wood for raised beds? Watch our video to find out if pressure treated wood is safe for gardening.

This question gets asked many times each season, and I thought I should see what new research has been done, and what the current thinking is.

Part of the issue here is that for years treated wood was infused with arsenic, which is bad stuff. In the last decade, two types of new treated woods have arrived in stores, and arsenic treated wood is no longer sold in the U.S. I don’t know if it is available anywhere else.

Untreated wood exposed to soil.

So, Can You Use Pressure Treated Wood For Raised Beds?

The new pressure treated wood contains an insect repellent and a mold inhibitor. From Wikipedia:

Alkaline Copper Quaternary (also known as ACQ) is a water based wood preservative method recently introduced in countries where there is a demand for alternatives to Chromated copper arsenate (CCA).[1] The treatment is made up of copper, a bactericide and fungicide which makes the wood resistant to biological attack, and a quaternary ammonium compound (quat) which acts as biocide, increasing the tolerance of treated timber to copper-resistant bacteria and fungi, and also acting as an insecticide.

In other words, it has chemicals to repel insects and fungus, the two main culprits in rotting wood.

Copper is the main ingredient in treated wood. If you’ve ever wondered why it has a green tint, its because of the oxidized copper. And we already use copper in our gardens to fight fungus in spray-on products we buy at the garden store.

Plus, we are exposed to copper in our home water pipes, many of which are made of copper. I read that one will ingest more copper from their household water than they will from copper from treated lumber.

From The University of Missouri Div Of Plant Sciences:

A 2007 study of the safety of ACQ published in Human and Ecological Risk Assessment concluded that exposure to copper from contact with ACQ-treated wood is not expected to have adverse effects on the health of adults or children.

So there you go. Considering how many airborne chemicals rains down on our gardens from the air, and we haven’t perished from that yet, it looks like its OK to use pressure treated wood for raised garden beds.

If you are still not convinced, you can line the inside of your raised garden beds with plastic as barrier between the treated wood and the garden soil.

Thoughts or questions? Let us know below.

May 18, 2016
Hoop House Cold Frame #2 – DIY GF Video

This is the second DIY Hoop House Cold Frame we have built in our video series. Easy to build, this mini greenhouse allows you to grow plants in winter. Watch the video here, plans and photos are below as well as links to our other DIY Hoop House Cold Frame Videos.

This cold frame uses a wire mesh that’s usually used for concrete, but it works really well as a cold frame form to hold the plastic up. I like how it works
You can buy this concrete reinforcing wire at a local lumber supply yard. It comes in two thicknesses, you want the thinner gauge wire, the thick wire is too much, I think. This wire also comes in rolls, but the it is a pain to work with. The mesh I bought was 10’ x 5’.

To cut the wire mesh we use a right angle grinder with a metal cutting disc. Be sure to wear ear and eye protection and wear gloves while you’re handling this material, it can cut your skin.

Be sure the cut end of the wire mesh faces the plywood end, else the plastic can get sliced by the sharp ends of the wire. You can put pieces of old garden hose along the end of the wire mesh where the plastic bends over to form the end wall, as well as on the plywood end to protect the plastic from the hard edges of the wire and wood.

But you can build this! It’s not hard and I really like it. Another great version of the hoop house cold frames that we’ve built, we have a whole series of them – link here – and every time we make one we get better and better. The super cool part is that you can extend your growing season in the fall and you can use one of these cold frames to warm up the soil in your vegetable beds in late winter and plant seeds even earlier than you could normally. Cold frame hoop houses are especially good for salad greens, radishes, sugar snap peas – plants that are cold tolerant.

You can use scrap wood to tie the corners together, or use brackets.

The automatic vent that we use is kind of a specialty item but that they’re not that expensive. Here is the link to buy it.

You could put one vent in or you could put in two vents. With two vents you would put plywood at both ends of this cold frame. Having a vent on both sides allows more warm air to exit. Cold frames can get quite hot, you don’t realize how much solar energy the sun has even in the winter. You will need to vent the hoop house, you can go out on sunny days and manually vent it if you want by lifting up the cold frames, but I’m not there all the time. So I like the automatic vents.
Have you made a cold frame? Do you have anymore questions? Pease leave them in the comments below.

My cold frame experiences have been greatly influenced by these books by Eliot Coleman and Niki Jabbour.

Four-Season Farm Year Round Vegetable Gardener (affiliate links)

Watch more of our hoop house cold frame plans videos here.

PVC Cold Frame Hoop House #3 – DIY GF Video

February 7, 2015
PVC Cold Frame Hoop House #3 – DIY GF Video
Easy to build PVC Cold Frame Hoop House is a mini greenhouse that allows you to grow salad greens and cold tolerant vegetables into the winter, and get a head start on early spring planting. This hoop house is more resistant to heavy snow than our previous versions, listed below.

This is version 3.0 of our cold frame hoop house. What I like about this one is that it’s a taller than our previous cold frames, so you could start to grow tall plants like kale or start sunflowers earlier in the spring.

A couple things to keep in mind while you’re building this hoop house, especially if you are using this on raised beds. You want this hoop house to fit just inside the walls of your raised bed. I made this mistake when I made my first hoop house, I didn’t measure how wide my raised bed was and the cold frame didn’t fit exactly. Experience has once again taught me something. The frame fits just inside the wooden sides of the raised bed and it doesn’t have to have a super tight seal with the soil, you do want some air exchange in and out. What the hoop house is doing is moderating temperature. When it gets really cold outside, it’s going to be cold in there but it will extend your growing season.

Consider planting some cold tolerant greens in August, I like a salad green mix that sold by Fedco seeds. They have a fall and winter lettuce greens mix and that’s worked really well for me.

One thing I did not mention in the video is that where the plastic meets the plywood ends of your hoop house, the plywood can cause the plastic to tear and so you might want to put something soft around the edge of the plywood. If you have some old garden hose you could split the garden hose open and run that along the edge of the plywood and that would go a long way toward making the plastic such that it wouldn’t rip.

For this 8′ x 4′ cold frame I used:
- Two 2×3 8′ long studs
  Two 2×3 studs cut to 45″ long
  One 1×2 8′ stud, you could also use a 2×2
  4 metal angle iron brackets
  3 pieces of 1/2″ Schedule 40 PVC cut to 6′ long
  1 1/4″ and 1 5/8″ drywall screws
  Two pieces of 4’x4′ thin plywood. You could also cut down a 4’x8′ piece.
  3 or 4 mil plastic, i used a roll of 10′ x 25′, which is enough for two hoop houses.
  Two thermatic vents, available here http://amzn.to/2Cg81fg
  Staple gun
Using the angle brackets, build a 4′ x 8′ wood frame, make sure the shorter pieces of 2×3 wood (the 45″ pieces) are inside of the larger pieces, so the outside dimensions are 48″ x 96″

I cut the plywood ends to match the arc of the pvc hoops. Take one of the hoops and curve it into the wood frame at the end of the frame, and use this to sketch the arc on the plywood ends, it does not have to be perfect.

My hoop house cold frame gardening has been greatly influenced by Eliot Coleman and Niki Jabour.

Four-Season Harvest The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener

Watch all of our hoop house videos here.
November 6, 2014
Grow Vegetables in Winter with a Cold Frame : GF video

Cold frames have been used to grow vegetables in winter since glass was invented. Winter gardening is made possible with cold frames and hoop houses. Using a recycled window, we built a cold frame last year – see our how to build a cold frame video here – and had good success growing vegetables in the winter and starting plants early in the spring using the cold frame.

This year I took volunteer plants that had sprung up around the garden: Mustard Greens, Swiss Chard, Garlic, Chives, and parsley and transplanted these plants into the cold frame. These plants all do well in colder weather, so we’ll have some nice greens for salads in the middle of winter. How cool is that?

The key to using a cold frame to grow vegetables is controlling the temperature inside the cold frame. We use an automatic vent that has louvers that open at about 45F, letting hot air out of the cold frame. It is called a crawlspace vent at the hardware store. You can buy the automatic vent online here.

The recycled window we used is a single glaze, meaning it has only one sheet of glass, you can also use double glazed windows. As we say at GardenFork: Use what you got.

You can make a larger cold frame, aka a plastic hoop house greenhouse, by watching our hoop house video here.

Let us know your cold frame and hoop house tips and suggestions below, thx, eric.

November 13, 2012
Hurricanes, Gardening, & Beekeeping GF Radio

Today we talk about hurricanes, weather forecasting, and hurricane preparedness with Tyler, who is the CEO of Allison House, a severe weather data company you can learn more about Allison house at AllisonHouse.com ( a GF sponsor )
We continue with how to predict hurricanes and how the national hurricane Center creates different models using different algorithms make spaghetti patterns about where a hurricane is going to hit land or as they call it in the business, make landfall.
Do the TV networks over hype hurricanes rainstorms winter storms? Tyler talks about how TV networks and the media in general could do a better job informing us about hurricanes and severe weather.
It’s gotten to the point where people think the TV networks and media are just crying wolf, so many times a storm is coming and the media and TV networks make a really big deal out of it and then the storm doesn’t happen. Then people tend to become more skeptical and then when the real thing actually occurs they get taken by surprise because we’ve been numbed to the weather hype.
Next up is how to seal the concrete of your garage floor or basement floor. Tyler tells us how he is preparing the concrete floor of his garage for the epoxy paint sealer that he’s going to apply to the cement which is one of the last parts of his home renovation.
we move on to vegetable gardening and how to keep cabbage months from attacking your cabbage and what to do about squash vine borers and our squash vine borer video. Then how to mulch your vegetable beds with leaf mulch and how you can make leaf mulch and how you can use believes that people put out at the end of their driveway in the suburbs for leaf mulch and why we like raised beds . You can watch our how-to video on how to make raised beds here and we also have a video about how to make leaf mulch by clicking here
Next we talk about beekeeping and we are both harvesting honey this fall tyler talks about using a hot night for the first time and how long it takes to harvest honey. Tyler had a very large harvest of honey this year and Eric did not.
We’ve made a bunch of how to raise bees, we call it beginning beekeeping videos on garden fork and you can watch all of them by clicking here if you want to watch the video on how to harvest honey click here
Then Tyler tells us about his upcoming trip to Scotland Tyler recommends the website visit Scotland.com which is run by the Scottish tourism board. Eric would very much like to visit Scotland and looks forward to hearing from the Scottish tourism board. You do have a question or comment about garden fork radio you can call our listener voicemail line 860 740 6938.

photo by wallyir

September 11, 2011