Drip, drip, drip!

Thanks to the kindest garden volunteer at Epiphany, we now have a working drip irrigation system! It will run two times a day, once before dawn and once at 10:00am. The tomatoes will love it! At the end of July, we will plant the last four raised beds and have drip irrigation in them. By then, I hope the bug situation will be under control.

Now…does anyone have mulch?

Where have all the carrots gone?

Have I mentioned how much I hate bugs? It appears that cuttleworm bugs have eaten all the carrots I planted. I found just a few roots left. They are also chomping on the beans and tomatoes. I used Raid’s organic insecticidal soap and hope I can save them.

Have you noticed it’s getting hot? Heat and water have produced a fungus. Really nothing can be done about it. I really need the irrigation system!   Pray it gets done soon!

Caged

Tomatoes are like some wild animals (and other entities); they need to be restrained. The youth minister’s best friend gave the garden 24 tomato cages. Her church supports the Network, and she wanted to make a contribution to our garden. With the cages, the plants won’t touch the ground and, hopefully, will produce lots tomatoes. If you would like to check out the garden, there are four little tomatoes growing on one of the plants in the first garden bed.

Four raised beds are planted with Chef Jeff’s Early Girl and hybrid tomatoes, Chef Jeff’s California Wonders Green Peppers, Burpee’s Bush Blue Lake 47 green beans, Burpee’s Cucumber Bush Champion Slicing Cucumbers, and carrots. I am keeping a journal of the kinds of vegetables, their production, planting dates, problems, and so on. This should help us as we do our succession planting. We may have to make cucumber frames as the plants grow. Later in the season, we will have pole beans as well. In two of the beds, marigolds are starting to grow. They will help naturally control any insects that may want to use the tomato plants as a snack.

We may have our drip irrigation problem solved next week!

No Drip in Time

Veggies love water. Lots and lots of water. No water, no veggies.    Unfortunately, our drip irrigation system couldn’t be hooked up because the water source couldn’t be accessed.  To save our planted tomatoes and green peppers, I’m hand watering every day. Oy vey.

So begins the tale

Saturday, April 24, 2010

It was a beautiful sunshiny Texas day for the annual Spring into Spring youth event.  Eleven youths and three adults from the churches of Epiphany and St. Nickolas went to the Church of the Epiphany in Richardson to tackle the eight garden “coffin” beds and start a community vegetable garden.

The raised garden beds were designed so the “physically challenged”, such as myself, could work in the garden. Each box is approximately 2 feet high, 4 feet wide and 12 feet long.  Each box holds approximately 98 cubic feet of composted soil.

The kids loved the monster dirt pile. Theyenthusiastically tackled the still wet dirt.

Our garden tools were few, so we substituted sand pails and bare hands, as well as one wheel barrow, a hoe, and shovels, to move the dirt from the pile to the boxes.

They worked from 10:100AM to 3:00PM and filled

all 8 boxes.One of our garden committee members brought donated tomato plants. The kids planted all the tomato plants and three green pepper plants before calling it quits for the day.

And so the veggie garden grows.