Anybody else already get started? We have something like 9 billion tomato varieties this year, 50 million different peppers… and then a whole bunch of other stuff we probably shouldn’t be growing – since we could hardly care for the ones we had last year. But that is gardening right? Taking on too much, and griping about it the whole time… right?
What do you have going on in your garden… err basement… or… greenhouse?
The more we learn about how water is our most precious natural resource – the more we want to find the best ways to conserve it. Now we try to do native plants for the most part (I mean seriously, why wouldn’t you want to do that?) – but on the few we will need to water more… we have come up with a great way to utilize a lil bit more of your soaker hose.
What we have started to do is sort of wrap each plants base in the soaker hose. It is hard to explain without a picture, so let us get to that first…
As you can see in the picture, if you will give the base a nice lil wrap… you get 360 degree watering out of your hose, and you get a foot instead of 4 inches to help distribute that water.
We also like to group our plants so that we can water all of them at the same time. Which means when you wrap each plant with the soaker hose… you have to do a series of them. Not a big deal. Just create a daisy chain (seems like appropriate naming in this circumstance) of sorts. See below for a picture of this daisy chain method…
Pretty cool right? You can see at the very end, we have it wrapped twice with the slack. When we add a plant, we just coil that slack backwards until we hit our new plant and then wrap it.
Do you have tips to share with us? Post it in the comment area or email them to us. If it saves time, money, effort… pretty much if it makes gardening easy – let us know about it. And we will do our best to pass on any tips we find useful, because we are cool like that.
Other Gardening Tips:
The first time we ever grew tomatoes, we were over there just flipping through pruning and such and rolled a leaf over to find that ALIEN of a creature – the Tomato Hornworm.
We found this one on Saturday, and still… even though I was looking for hornworms… it still scared the crap out of me. haha
Last year I would drop them in a little cup of soapy water, because I really didn’t understand anything but the fact that this lil green monster was chewing my tomato leaves down to nubs! But since learning about the problems with bees… and how crops are pollinated… and all the other stuff you learn when you dig a lil bit under the surface – we have learned that these guys turn into the Hawk Moth. We recently had a discussion on twitter/facebook about this and here is a link to even more info on the Hawk Moth/Tomato Hornworm.
Since we like the hawk moth, we decide to just take those green aliens to a nearby plant that is not on our property (haha) and let them free. We are considerate like that.
We have seen quite a few lately (we are in West Texas), so if you haven’t started looking – better get to it. And if you live near us… you better definitely be checking… just sayin’.
Also a few other lil critters have shown up – not sure what all of them are… but did snap a few pics.
Aunt Deb thought had a few ideas, but I dunno.. never seen this one before and I don’t think anyone has nailed it yet. Give it a shot?
… this next one, well we kinda caught these two… ahem… umm.. well… kinda… “in the moment”
Are you infested yet? Anyone have any pests they can’t get rid of or maybe a new tip to keep the squash bugs at bay? Share with the class, please.
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