Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Planting Tomatoes and Laying Drip Lines

Yesterday was tomato planting day! Here's the gang. These are ready to vacate their yogurt pots and spread their roots in the new (!) garden bed. I planted 11 plants yesterday which included 2 Amish Pastes, 3 Fiaschettos, a yellow cherry named Sunshine Cherry, a pink cherry named Wheatly's Frost Resistant, a pink tomato named Rosabec, a yellow one named Jaune Flamme, a red beefsteak named Martian Giant, and a black standard sized tomato named Nyagous. All of them are new for me other than the Amish Paste and Fiaschetto and they are all supposed to be adapted to cool climate and/or short season growing. You can read more about them here.



The only amendment that I added to the soil yesterday was about a pound of pulverized egg shells which I dug into the top 12 inches of the soil. I had already thoroughly incorporated my usual amendments (crab meal, sulfate of potash, humic acid, and Sustane fertilizer) into the soil when I filled the bed.



I put the tomato cages in place to figure out the spacing before I planted the tomatoes. The bed is precisely long enough to hold 11 cages. My cages are made from concrete reinforcing mesh. They are 5 feet tall with a 6 foot circumference and the openings in the mesh are 6 inches square which makes it easy to reach into the cages to harvest the tomatoes. I don't stake the plants within the cages, as the tomatoes grow I simply keep tucking the vines inside the cages and they grow up within the cages and often times over the tops and down the sides.



Once the tomatoes are snugly settled into the bed and the cages are set on top of the soil I use a 4 foot length of rebar to anchor the cage. The rebar pole is pushed 2 feet into the soil (as far as it can go without piercing the hardware cloth lining the bottom of the bed) and then I fasten the cage to the rebar using a couple of UV resistant reusable cable ties.



I had my earliest tomato crop in this garden a couple of years ago when I experimented with covering my tomato cages with plastic sheeting (see here). Of course I planted them out a lot earlier that year but my experience in this garden is that it doesn't matter how early I plant the tomatoes, without protection they simply will not set a significant number of tomatoes until late June or mid July without protection from the cold nighttime temperatures. So this year I invested in some UV resistant plastic that is designed to cover green houses or hoop houses. I completely enclosed the row of cages, staking the edges to the soil and clipping the ends closed. I left the tops open at each end and where there is a seam near the middle of the row I propped open a space so that the "greenhouse" is vented to keep it from getting too hot during the day. I hope that this protected environment will help the plants to grow more quickly and set some tomatoes before the end of July. We'll see... Next year I will be able to get an earlier start and the plastic is sturdy enough that I should be able to reuse it for a few more seasons.



So, a bit about my irrigation system. We simply do not get any rain here in the summer so I could never keep my garden adequately watered without irrigation. Overhead sprinklers are too wasteful, water is a precious commodity here and we try to use the least wasteful methods for watering our gardens. I'm fortunate to have my own private well, I don't have to pay the incredible rates that the water company charges, but that doesn't mean that I want to waste water. I've found that the most efficient method for watering my raised beds is to use drip irrigation. I use quarter inch tubing that has emmiters imbeded in the lines every six inches. This particular type emitter tubing is hard to find locally and is very expensive when I do find it so I purchase it in 500-foot rolls online from DripWorks.

I cut the drip lines into 6-foot lengths and run them about 8 inches apart down the length of the beds. I could cut the lines longer but I find that 6 foot lengths are more manageable.



The lines are pinned to the soil using U-shaped stakes placed about every 12 inches, more or less.



Each line is connected to the main 5/8-inch line using flexible 1/4-inch vinyl tubing. I prefer vinyl tubing to the more standard polyethylene tubing because the vinyl is much more flexible, you just have to be sure to keep the water pressure below 30 PSI to keep the lines from blowing off the connectors. I buy the vinyl tubing in 500-foot rolls as well. At the moment I have my main line set up to connect to a garden hose. You can see that connector in the second photo from the top above. Normally I have these lines running to a box that has valves that are controlled by an irrigation controller so that I can schedule the irrigation to run on a set schedule. When my bed construction project is finally completed I'll get that system set up again.



Here's what the drip looks like when it first starts running.



And finally a bit of an update on the rest of the garden. This is the first bed that I started planting. At the moment it contains Oregon Sugar Pod II snow peas, Super Sugar Snap peas, Rolande bush filet beans, and Greek Gigante runner beans. Oh, and the cilantro seeds that I scatter around are starting to pop up as well. The brown weedy looking thing sitting on the soil is a Golden Corn Salad plant that went to seed so I put it there to drop its seeds. The corn salad should start to volunteer sometime this late autumn when the soil temperature cools.



The box for bed number three has just been built and lined with hardware cloth. I need to get more soil and start pushing that wheelbarrow again...



And the view of the whole garden. There's a smidge of soil left in the last bed that will be moved to the newest bed and then that space needs to be leveled and the final box will be built (finally). Sheesh, whoever said that growing your own veggies is a money saver? Not in this garden...



And the final reward for those of you who made it all the way through to the end of this post. Meet my constant garden companion Scleroporus occidentalis. This girl and her boyfriend are there to greet me nearly every time I enter the garden. They have been whooping it up lately, puffing up and doing push-ups, showing off to each other and the competition. It's spring, and you know what happens in spring. There should be baby Scleroporus's running about in a few months...


And speaking of babies, I wish I had had my camera on hand at the time, I found a very young gopher snake sleeping off a recent meal when I was moving the soil out of the last bed. I'm so happy to see the gopher snakes are back in the neighborhood! And there's a Whiptail and I think an Alligator lizard running around as well. It sure is gratifying to know that the (good) critters are finding a refuge in my garden, I must be doing something right.

19 comments:

  1. It must be exciting to finally get to plant up your garden. I hated the year that I only had a part of a garden and the yard was not done yet.

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  2. It's nice to have garden companions meet you at the garden!

    Your garden looks great! I'm sure you aren't looking forward to filling that bed!

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  3. What a beautiful garden system. Neat, orderly, practical, and water-wise. Good that you put in a plug for water conservation here in sunny California. But growing a garden to save money? HAHAHAHA. Same at our house. I'm off to Home Depot to spend more money on my garden. I need some of the terracing blocks that I saw in your garden so I can set up a tiny new place in our yard to grow pumpkins this year.

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  4. You have so much trouble with your bad critters it's nice to see the good guys, no? I will have to garden for 100 years to break even on my garden. But it's cheaper than therapy. . .

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    1. LOL, It is indeed cheaper than therapy, I'll have to remember that one the next time my husband exclaims about the cost!

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  5. Putting in beds as well constructed as yours are indeed expensive - but they are also part of your landscape in my opinion and not necessarily the cost of the food production you are doing in those beds. The plants would grow withotu the edges etc., but it looks better and you can add nice features like the submergerd hardware cloth for critter control etc.

    The tomato patch is a thing of beauty. :D I do much the same only I actually open up the ends on all but the coolest of days, and close it up on chilly nights. It really does make a big difference I have found too. Your supports are particularly nice and look to be very sturdy.

    Glad your ambitious garden project is nearing completion. It is turning out wonderfully and I am sure you are glad to reclaim the garden again too.

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  6. Do you have problems with ground squirrels there as well and if so do you have any tips. Looks like from the photos they might be around in the nearby wild lands. I can deal with rabbits and even gophers with trapping but the squirrels seem to have that extra intelligence that makes them difficult to cope wit at times.

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  7. I haven't seen Sustane locally here in southern california but have been using eb stone which i guess is a similar product. However i notice if you look at the Washington state fertilizer database that sustane has some higher levels of metals than others so you might want to be aware of that although i'm sure its probably not too much to worry about.
    Sustane
    http://agr.wa.gov/PestFert/Fertilizers/FertDB/prodinfo.aspx?pname=6731
    EB Stone
    http://agr.wa.gov/PestFert/Fertilizers/FertDB/prodinfo.aspx?pname=5001

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  8. Loving your lizard. You must be so proud of your new beds - they look fantastic. Thanks for providing your fertilising regime for the tomatoes - i'm pretty sure I underfed mine this year and I plan to rectify that this coming season.

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  9. Good luck with the new tomato varieties. It sounds as though they will suit your shorter growing season. I think it's important to find a variety that suits the area they're grown in - we find that an old Languedocian variety grows best, needing little water, so we save seeds from that each year now. Your new beds look fantastic! And the watering system is interesting and very effective I should think.

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  10. The little lizard looks very similar to the one my chicken at last month: http://10yearchallenge.com/2012/05/06/2171/ I hope yours has a better fate.

    The beds look really great! Putting in a decent irrigation system is always on my to-do list, but I haven't tackled it yet.

    Sandy

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  11. How is your new tomato "greenhouse" working? I planted 37 tomatoes in my greenhouse here in MT a couple days ago, they are in raised beds and I also cover them with plastic at night, but it looks as if I may half killed about half of them. It still gets into the 30's here at night, but with the protection I though they would be okay, wrong again! I hope at least some survive. My beans are also damping off, so I must have planted them too early as well. Mabye next year I should stick to all greens and garlic, too of my favorite crops that do well here.

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    1. elizabeth, So sorry to hear about your tomatoes and beans - what a challenging climate you have! My tomatoes are doing fine, so far... The nighttime lows have been in the low 40's and the "greenhouse" has been keeping things nice and comfy at night. The daytime highs have been hovering in the mid 50's to high 60's lately so there's been no danger of cooking the tomatoes. I'm really happy with how they are doing. Keeping my fingers crossed...

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  12. Look forward to seeing your tomato harvest!
    Do you freeze any of your green coriander seed? I was thinking of growing a patch just for the green seed to freeze. I think it would be great for adding to dal. Does it freeze well? Last year I froze a bunch of fresh cilantro and it worked out great, I add it to soups at the last minute, same with italian parsley.

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  13. elizabeth, I didn't freeze any of the green seeds, but what a great idea. However, I pulled out all the plants and stripped the green seeds off and dried them, and they are the most fragrant dried coriander seeds ever! I'll not let my coriander seeds dry on the plants again unless I want to collect seeds to plant. Now I'm waiting for the current generation of cilantro to bolt, at least what I don't harvest for the greens.

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  14. Looks great! We have some tomatoes in our little high-tunnel, and I must say, they are growing much better underneath the plastic than they our out in the garden.

    For your irrigation, do you use some sort of pressure regulator or drip nozzles? We set up ours, and instead of dripping, it sprays everywhere!

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    1. Prairie Cat, The valves that I normally hook the system into can be adjusted to control the pressure. There are also devices thatl can be installed on the main line that limit the pressure to a predetermined PSI. At the moment I just attach the garden hose and turn it on to just enough that the drippers drip but don't spray.

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  15. Oh this looks great! I am new to your blog. Glad I found it!

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  16. Beautiful beds and drip system you have there, glad the project is done hopefully those nasty critters will not tunnel through and eat your plants again.

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