Over the
years we have had numerous gardens here on the ranch. Most of which have been in my large garden
area and for one reason or another they have always gotten away from me. I think it was mainly due to trying to do too
much at once.
This last
winter we moved our geese into that garden to clean it up, and well we have
just kept right on housing them there at night.
Now it is
spring and the geese are all comfy in their totally enclosed pen and so we are
looking at different gardening options.
There are numerous things to consider when planning a garden of any sort. Besides soil, sun, and water availability. One such thing is the fact we travel a lot and Sean can only do so
much each night after work before it gets dark.
So it has to be an easy to maintain garden for those days we are gone.
Another
thing to consider is none of us are as spry as we use to be and we aren’t
getting any younger. So working low,
even in my raised gardens has been getting harder and harder to do.
So in 2015
we are trying a different approach, we are going back to container gardening,
but raising it up off the ground high enough that it can be worked either from
a standing position or sitting on my gardening bench.
Because the
geese are enjoying the larger garden area we decided to put the container
garden in the small goose pen where fencing will help keep the geese, when free
ranging, from consuming everything in the garden.
This
location will also help keep my over-zealous spring enthusiasm from expanding
this garden to beyond the easy to care for dictate.
Budget, as
always, was another concern. We have
already invested hundreds if not thousands in the large garden area in the past
and didn’t want to do that again.
So the 2015
Experimental Garden needed to be compact, intensely companion planted, and
efficient.
Here’s how
it is going so far.
First my husband
removed the tree branches that had fallen in the pen over the winter, weed
whacked the grass and weeds as short as he could in the long narrow pen and
then gathered cinder blocks from around the property that were not currently
being used for other projects.
The cinder
blocks were stacked two high in a single row every four feet for sixteen
feet. This was to be the length of the
garden “bed”. It doesn’t sound like
much, but for what I have planned I feel it will be sufficient.
On top of
the cinder block he ran two lengths of landscape timbers with the flat side up
to act as support between the cinder blocks.
As he did
this I went around the property looking for suitable “planters”. Because I was mainly planting tomatoes, which
can have a taproot of 21 inches I needed large pots. Which I already had several of in the main
garden area.
One problem,
those pots were either too heavy to move, or crumbling due to the years of
being out in year round weather. Most of
those were not going to work. Better to
leave them where they were to grow native grasses for the geese in.
At Gary’s
suggestion I took a hard look at other options, including some black plastic
file boxes. Their size and shape were
great for the use I had in mind, but their color had me concerned. I didn’t want to bake my garden while it was
growing and Oklahoma summers can get intense.
After much
consideration I decided to go with them because during the hottest days I can
use shade cloth over them and during the cooler fall days they will help extend
the harvest, hopefully.
We had nine
of those boxes still in useable condition despite being over 20 years old. That still left a lot of space to fill in on
the long narrow support system Gary had assembled.
I found five
large round flower pots that could be moved and used. They were added to the group growing outside
the short fence to be lifted into the garden once the base was ready.
The
remainder of the space was filled with 5 gallon soda syrup jugs we had received
for free from a local feed store that Gary had previously cut the bottom off
of. By turning these upside down the
spout became the drain to prevent over watering.
Once all the
containers were gathered outside the fence they were moved into the little
garden where they were placed alternating the white colored jugs between the
dark colored containers to help distribute the heat from or the lack there of
the sun depending upon the season. The black tubs would be heat sinks so to speak.
Gary drilled
drain holes in the containers that didn’t already have some and we are ready to
begin filling the garden up.
This gave me
16 feet of roughly 2 foot wide garden space.
In another subsection of the pen we will place an old, beyond repair, wheel barrel as a planter. More on this in a later post.
I already have
porch rail flower baskets on my porches so I ordered a roll of coconut fiber to
line them with. The plan is to fill
these baskets with items like herbs, radishes, and other shallow growing
edibles, including edible flowers. I
will add more about this as time goes on as well.
I had
attended the Sand Springs Herbal Affair in April and had been working hard at
keeping tomato, pepper and catnip plants alive indoors until the weather
leveled out some. If it ever levels out
in Oklahoma.
These would
be the first thing to plant, but first I needed to fill all those pots.
I am a firm
believer in organic gardening via the Lasagna Gardening method, be it on the
ground, or in a pot. I had several bags,
albeit not enough, of compost and garden soil on hand. I also had an abundance of pine needles and
leaves That left only peat moss/coconut
fiber substitute that would be needed to help hold moisture in the pots.
By using the
soils I had on hand that helped cut the cost of the set-up at to a minimum.
Up to that point we had spent $14 for the
four landscape timbers because all the ones we currently had were being
used. We had also spent $15 on garden
plants to that point.
Most
everything else I plan on growing from seed and because I am a seed saver
and a bargain shopper I have pretty much all the seeds I need on hand.
Therefore
the entire cost up to this point of this garden, including the natural moisture
control will be under $50 once the coconut fibers are all paid for.
Not a bad
start.
Jan who will
go into the intensive planting of the pots in her next post in OK
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