Adventures in Square Foot Gardening
A Cherry Bomb pepper, that is! Week 6 and we’re moving right along. Plants are growing and the first pepper has developed.
I also went crazy and pulled out a radish. Since they were planted on April 11, I thought they might be ready. I was thinking 30 days for radishes. Turns out, you should read the fine print. …
We celebrated May Day on Friday with glorious spring weather. The garden is coming along very well at this point. So now it is time to add supports for the peppers and eggplants and get the tomatoes trimmed up. I also weeded the beds a few times this week, which took about 10 minutes total! Once again, we had a lot of rain this week, so only a few cups of water were needed on Saturday.
Above, you can see how well everything is doing….
It is with heavy heart that I announce the death of our serrano pepper plant. We held a private burial service and mourned its demise. We’re fairly certain that the crazy amount of rain in the past 10 days didn’t bode well for this one. So – we cut our losses.
Then we went ahead and planted a cherry bomb pepper in its square! About the same heat level and this plant looked great at Country Boys. Don’t these look delicious? Here’s hoping our harvest will look like this!
(not actual peppers from our garden)
Week 4 and it is time to add the supports for the tomato, zucchini and pepper plants. These are tomato towers that we ordered through squarefootgardening.com ($39.99/each). They would have been really easy to make using conduit, rebar and netting, but I’ll admit to taking the easy way out and just having them delivered. (This is a spectacularly busy time at Soil and Water – what with Earth Month and all) It’s all set up below.
This whole project took about 20 minutes for setting up and intall. Super easy and quick! Here’s the way it went…
First, the package:
Components laid out:
Now, assembly time! Position the curved pieces behind the bed to easily see where the rebar supports need to go. Hammer that rebar into the ground.
You can see here how far into the ground we went:
Next – slide the poles onto the rebar
Then attach the tops and secure the netting. You can tie it on, but we used zip ties. We had them, they were convenient and easy! (can you see the convenient theme running through this project?)
Final Product!
So we had really bad storms yesterday with up to golf ball sized hail in local areas. Oh no! How would the garden do? (image from WYFF)
I found out when I got home. You know, I never considered holes in the plants. Knocked down – yes – I could imagine that, but these are little. I thought the leaves would just bend under fire. Nope.
Now I know that hail can knock holes right in the leaves of the plants.
Ok – they’ll be fine. At least we’re due for good weather for the next few days!
Square Foot Gardener in Taylors, SC