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.

 

Something to save time, money and your back when planting larger seeds!

Simple Device for helping plant larger seeds at regular intervals.

I love this home made device as it really does help when sowing larger seeds in a furrow. It ensures that the seeds are planted at the recommended spacing and doesn't require any bending down.

Here is a picture of me using the sowing tool last year when we were planting corn.

Very very simple. I made this from some pipe that I had left over from a different project (I think that I got the idea from Pinterest). You simply drop the seed in the longer pipe and use the horizontal piece of pipe to determine the spacing of the seeds with the shorter vertical pipe having an end cap which is placed on top of the previous seed.

What I really like is that none of the pipes are glued in place but are simply (and firmly) pushed together. This means that for different seed types the size of the horizontal pipe can be changed which changes the distance between seeds.

I have used this over several years principally for squash and corn seeds, but it could equally be used for other seeds.

Now if you know how to evenly space out much smaller seeds, such as those for carrots, onions etc please let me know as I hate destroying seedlings when I thin out these seedlings.

I have never seen such an event before in my life!

On Boxing Day 2020 (summer in the Southern Hemisphere), at around 3.40 pm, we experience the following hail storm that lasted for around five minutes. 

Initially I was in awe at the event, watching the hail stones bounce off the solar panels, but then I started to worry about the newly constructed (and not 100% completed) greenhouse and whether the roof had withstood the impact of the hundreds of little bullets that must have hit its poly-carbonate glazing! I was confident that the solar panels could withstand the battering but the greenhouse was another question! The hail was the largest that I had ever seen with it being physically painful to stand out in the open and be hit by it.

When the hail stopped and I ventured into the garden to my relief the greenhouse was fine however this was not the case for some of the vegetables! The impact of the hail on the different vegetables varied enormously with the corn having survived relatively unscathed due to its tougher leaves but the lettuce and squash had suffered the worse damage with there leaves looking as through they had passed through a shredder!

                        Lettuce                                                            Squash

The morning had been chilly but nothing exceptional and there was no warning from the meteorological office. Although it is not the first time that this has happened in our area it was the most severe Hail storm that anyone could remember. 

Three weeks Latter.

With the damage being so intensive to the squash and the lettuce it must have drastically set back their development however both had recovered well after three weeks with the squash, in particular, having grown profusely with some good sized fruit having been set.

Lettuce and Squash on the 21st of January (squash showing hail damage center bottom).

Conclusion.

Perhaps surprisingly, the lettuce and the squash (the worst affected plants) were able to weather the damage inflicted by the hail storm. Some of the lettuce have already been harvest and the squash have set some good fruit that will be harvested in a months time. 

So do not lose heart even when faced with unexpected and severe events. Keep gardening and keep learning:>)

What the Heck!

 Pill Bug (aka Woodlice) attack on the strawberries!!! 

At this rate we will have no strawberries to eat this year. Time to send in the "hard working" Biological Control Agents (BCAs)!

Was this such a clever idea? Not so sure as they did a lot of damage trampling the strawberries but they really enjoyed themselves .....

But after 48 hours, and having been returned to their coup, had they do their job of controlling the Pill Bugs???? To get an idea we placed potatoes sliced in half, (with the middle scrapped out) and with their cut side down in contact with the soil. This supposedly attracts Pill Bugs and will give us an idea of their population. After 36 hrs we checked the potatoes. And what did we find ....

Loads of Pill Bugs still!!! so much for the BCAs😋

This potato, plus "guests" was quickly placed in the chicken coup where the chooks took an "interest" in the Pill Bugs but were not voracious about it. I very much suspect that if the chooks have a choice between eating crunchy Pill Bugs or lovely red ripe Strawberries they have a distinct preference😉 Can't blame them and great learning experience for us (and family fun chasing after the chooks to relocate them firstly in the Soft Fruit Cage and them back to their coup).

Update.

The day after posting the above I collected more Pill Bugs from the potatoes and placed the Pill Bug in an old ice-cream container and present this to the Chooks in the chicken house. Once again the Chicken were really not interested in eating the Pill Bugs. So my conclusion has to be that Chooks are not effective Pill Bug control agents!

We have now tried to raise the strawberries off the ground to get them physically away from the Pill Bugs with a thick mulch of hay. I will let you know how we get on with this.