Extending the Irrigation System.

 Irrigation Extension to the Greenhouse and an Additional Tap.

It is so useful to have water readily available in the vegetable garden. I installed one tap a couple of years ago but as the vegetable garden has grown I thought that, while extending the irrigation system to the Greenhouse, I would take the opportunity of installing a second tap which would allow for a greater irrigation range and less long hosepipes dragging across the garden.

Most of the pipeline used was 3/4 inch (20mm) PVC with connectors PE (20mm). For the greenhouse I think that this is overkill as the amount of water needed in the greenhouse is a little but often however I wanted as much as possible to keep all the fittings the same size to make the installation easier (I always end up needing more fittings with an extra trip back to CWS in Mot, who are very helpful even for small orders).

The installation did require a bit of trench digging which took some time, probably not best to do this in the height of summer when the soil is pretty solid but ......... That's life.

Installing a tee (the soil is pretty dry and the trench pretty shallow). I normally leave the trench open where I have installed connectors etc until I have tested the lines to make sure that there are no leaks. 

The hardest part of the job was drilling a hole through the blocks at the back of the greenhouse. This took ages due to my drill not really being up to the job, but got there in the end.

And another tap installed in the Vegetable garden. I STRONGLY recommend using metal fittings as these last much longer and help to avoid cross threading any connectors (which drives me crazy as once a cross thread has started it is impossible to get the thread back and the connector is then useless).

I will do another blog on the irrigation inside the greenhouse next month.

HugelKultur. What the heck is it and will it work in my Greenhouse???

What is Hugelkultur?

Good question:>)

Well Hugelkultur is a German word meaning mound culture or hill culture.

But what is it actually? 

It is a horticultural technique of burying wood/twigs/decaying plant material as a raised bed with the idea being that the organic material will act a little like a sponge soaking up water and rotting to improve soil fertility, water retention and soil warming which all benefit plant growth.

After one month.

After one year.

After two years.

After twenty years.

As I had to recently fill up the raised beds in my greenhouse I did not want to fill the whole beds with compost, as this would essentially cost a fortune, so after watching a You Tube video for "Self Sufficient Me" ((948) How To Hügelkultur AMAZING Grow Method For Raised Beds Vegetable Gardens - Organic & Cheap - YouTube) I thought that I would give Hugelkultur a try and see if it would not only save me money but also help to produce a bountiful crop.

The bottom of the bed was filled with smallish would rounds taken from largely gum trees that we felled a couple of years ago and had stored for firewood.

Then I added a load of waste organic material from the compost pile to try to "fill in" the gaps between the rounds.

This was followed by a healthy dose of rotten horse manure.

With a final "topping" of mature compost and a wetting from the irrigation system.

I have no idea if this will work or how well it will work. I expect the level of the soil in the bed to drop enormously over the next few months and this will have to be topped up with the mature compost. What I have already noticed is a lot of insect life within the greenhouse and on the beds, although I am not sure if this is a good or bad thing! 

I will let you know how I get on and what my impressions are. Is it worth doing? Well at least I have saved money on compost so so far so good:>)

Update 27th of Feb.

Although only just started the experiment I am noticing that the soil is warmer and that the seeds that I recently planted are germinating very quickly, although this might be due to the Greenhouse Environment rather than the HugelKultur beds (very hard to separate the two). But my first impressions are positive (so far). Still a LOT of buds on the beds and in the Greenhouse in general.