Growing Glorious Gutter Gardens!

Chris with part of our 2013 strawberry harvest

Chris seriously LOVES strawberries!  We've mentioned a couple of times how in 2013, poor Chris practically broke his back by spending 6+ hours stooped over his precious strawberry patch, trying to eradicate all the evil ground ivy.

We recently came across a photo of how bad our old strawberry patch was a couple of weeks before Chris meticulously weeded it in the infamous back-breaking weeding session:

There are strawberries in there?!?

Well, so while we moved quite a lot of herbs, asparagus, and other plants to our farmhouse in 5-gallon buckets, we didn't transplant any of our strawberries just in case the entangled ground ivy hitched a ride and started invading our new yard.

So this meant that Chris has to go without homegrown strawberries this season!  To give him something to look forward to, we did buy 75 strawberry plants to get started so we can have a larger-than-ever harvest next year!  We decided to plant the strawberries in 3 different areas and see how they fare.

Regular In-Ground Planting

This is pretty self-explanatory.  Bea promises to weed the strawberries so Chris doesn't have to!  There are two varieties growing in this bed, a total of 40 plants.  This photo is taken from the porch swing we put in our main garden area, so the strawberries will be easy for us to keep an eye on every time we sit down to take a break!

Topsy Turvy Strawberry Planter

This was a present Bea gave Chris for his birthday last year after he'd mostly recovered from the back injury he acquired in his quest to save his delicious strawberries.  It's kind of a gimmick, it even says “AS SEEN ON TV" on the side of the box!  But the lure of weed-free strawberries leads us all to try some crazy things.  The planter is basically a tube of plastic that expands to hold sterile potting mix (sterile = no weeds!).  You plant the strawberries out the portals on the sides, so they grow sideways.  This planter holds 15 plants, so we have two varieties of strawberries growing in here to see how they do.  We'll update as they grow!

Gutter Gardens

The internet indicates that it's gotten pretty popular to plant strawberries in gutters!  We've never tried it before, but it seemed like a great idea to keep weeds out of the berry patch, so we're giving it a try.  We installed these in our hoophouse, where ideally weed seeds won't be blown in.  Here's how we did it:

Step 1: Acquire gutters & endcaps

Safety first!

We found some assorted & mismatched gutters for super-cheap at Community Forklift, our favorite reuse store.  I think we paid $10 for the lot of them.  The 14' sections only just barely fit in adVANture Van, with a piece of cardboard to stop the sharp metal from scratching the windshield!  We somehow got home without incident.

Definitely the modern system

We decided to use the two lengths of round gutters for this project, while we'll use the regular gutters on the sides of the hoophouse for the rain collection system.  Unfortunately though, we couldn't find round endcaps anywhere locally.  So we ordered 4 of those from guttersupply.com, and they arrived almost instantly, really fast shipping!  Chris used Bea's grandpa's antique rivet gun to attach the endcaps.  You might want to caulk the seam from the inside with waterproof caulk intended for use with gutters -- we forgot about this step but it seems to work fine, just water more often if you don't caulk it.

Step 2: Tie your knots

We debated for a really long time about the best type of knot and pulley system to use.  Ultimately, we opted to keep it super simple -- we just looped a double length of rope around the gutter, connected to itself with an overhand knot, and tossed it over the purlin of the hoophouse, no pulleys needed!  We temporarily tied a loose knot around the hip board until we could go to the hardware store to buy some cleats.

There are some really fancy ways you can connect gutters (we especially liked this one), but in our case we are going for functionality and affordability over aesthetics, and this system meets both our goals.

Step 3: Attach cleats

This is somewhat optional, but it will make it a lot easier than tying & untying knots every time you want to raise & lower your gutter garden.  Also, we wanted to keep the weight of the gutter garden off our hipboards since those will eventually be supporting the weight of water running through exterior gutters and we're a little dubious about how sturdy they are!  Since we're attaching these cleats to the metal hoops we used self-tapping metal screws.

So now your garden should look like this:

Now you're ready to plant!

Step 4: Add a layer of pea gravel

Along with many other ridiculous things we decided to move from the city, we ended up with a tub of leftover pea gravel that we knew would come in useful for something, someday.  Up north, it had been stored outdoors for a few years in a plastic container which had cracked, so as we moved it onto our dolly the thing slowly started splitting open.  To get it into the van, we had to use a couple of ratchet straps to hold everything together and prevent further breakage.  Needless to say, this was one of those times Chris says “Are you SURE we need this $#@%$#% gravel?" and Bea says “It's for your STRAWBERRIES!" and Chris says “ANYTHING for my strawberries!" and we get it loaded no matter how much of a pain in the butt it is!  Once we got it to the farmhouse, we procrastinated unloading the van for a full month, trying to forget it existed.  There were also 1,000 pounds (yes, literally) of cinder blocks that we'd moved at the same time, so that might've had something to do with it too.  adVANture Van was a hard worker!  Eventually, we shoveled the gravel into a spare trash can where it sat forgotten until we were installing this gutter garden.  But then, it was the perfect thing!

So anyway, add a layer of gravel in the bottom of your gutters.  This will improve the drainage and make sure the roots of your plants aren't sitting in pools of water.  You don't need a ton, just an inch or so.

Step 5: Add potting mix

We used a lightweight sterile potting mix and will fertilize (organically) rather than adding compost, which may contain weed seeds.  You could also use any homemade mixture of soil/compost/perlite/sand/etc but just keep in mind the weight of your system will probably double when watered, so try to aim for a lightweight mix.

Step 6: Plant!

We counted out our remaining plants (20) and measured the gutters (12' each) and did the math to space them evenly.  Strawberries should be planted 12-18" apart, so as long as you're within that range you should be OK.

Step 7: Water regularly!

Here Chris demonstrates you can either lower the gutters to waist-height to water them,
or just stand on a 5-gallon bucket.

Being able to lower the gutter gardens will definitely come in handy when it's time to harvest next year!

Grow, strawberries, grow!!!

Signs of spring

For as long as I (Bea) can remember, Autumn has always been my favorite season.  I love the color and crunch of the leaves, the juxtaposition of the first cooling winds with the still-warm sun hitting your skin, the feeling of abundance but impermanence of everything around you.

Redbud

This year though, after a really bitter cold winter, spring seems to be vying for that favorite season prize in my heart.  Part of it is being in a new place, coupled with my terrible tree-bark ID skills.  Everywhere I turn, I see what I have perceived as a gray looming stack of twigs in the background of our yard, now surprising me with beautiful spring blooms.  Some trees & shrubs I had half-way considered chopping down turn out to be fruit-bearing!

Spring bulbs are popping up everywhere & changing the routes of walking paths we've gotten in the habit of taking all winter while the bare ground presented us with no obstacles.  Areas we thought were only full of weeds turn out to have been carefully landscaped at some point in the past, just overgrown.  The winter snows have killed back most of the weeds and we are seeing the gardens take a fresh start.

Last November, we dug up and divided a bunch of herbs we'd planted at our old house and community garden plot back in DC.  In 5-gallon buckets, we drove it all down here and popped it into a front garden bed that looked totally overgrown (besides an enormous butterfly bush).  We hoped that moving the herbs as they were going dormant would allow them the winter to recover and hopefully survive.

The first signs of life we saw this spring were some of our transplanted sorrel leaves in early March.  Daffodils started peeking their stems up around the same time, and then some chives.  At first I was out there encouraging the plants to grow, then I saw on the weather forecast that a mega snowstorm was predicted just after St Patrick's Day, so I switched my tune to telling the plants to stop growing & wait.  Not that the plants paid any attention, but somehow they were able to survive all the wintry weather, even a late mid-April freeze!  When the snows and frost receded and we saw leaves that were still green, we were very happy!

At the end of March, the raspberries that we planted just before Christmas also finally started budding.  From walking among the three rows of trellises, it looks like we had a pretty great survival rate despite giving those plants a rough start (storing them in a trash bag for 3 months!)  What a relief after all the effort building those trellises took!







Over on the other side of the house, the asparagus bed is slowly coming alive and yielding its delicious spring treats.  So far, unfortunately, none of the purple asparagus that we dug up and transplanted has sprouted, but the green variety that the previous farmhouse owners grew is pretty darn tasty.

In the hoophouse, the seeds we started in trays began germinating by the end of March.  At least every other day, I go out there and inspect the trays for new sprouts.  Depending on the size of the seed, the signs of life can be extremely tiny, but always very exciting!

Turnips and carrots are growing nicely in the hoophouse

Our seeds planted in the ground in the hoophouse were also starting to come up by the end of March, and many are now of harvestable size.










Radishes are always one of the earliest spring crops, only taking 3-4 weeks from when you pop the seed in the ground until you're eating them up.

The alien potatoes Chris planted back in March have grown leaves and appear to be doing well!

Indoors, our tomatoes had grown big enough they needed repotting into individual containers.  I had been avoiding this for some time because it's almost time to plant them outdoors, and repotting takes a bunch of potting soil and time to make sure everything stays labeled properly throughout the process.  But the main reason I was avoiding this task was due to lack of space.  The shelf I've used for seed-starting indoors is also the winter respite for various houseplants, so it only has enough space for 4 trays of vegetable/herb seedlings.  Unfortunately, with our plant-chewing cats, we have to keep the plants behind a window-screen setup to ensure survival!  However, while we were up in Maryland working on the house for sale, we picked up an amazing second-hand super professional plant growing rack from Community Forklift.  This new setup holds 8 trays, and so finally gives us the space needed to expand our indoor growing area and keep the pepper trays directly on a heat mat -- which has finally yielded just a bit of increased germination.  We're probably still going to have to buy some pepper plants, but most other plants we've seeded this spring have germinated great despite being older, expired seeds.

As more and more plants bud out in the yard, we realize we planted our herb garden in the middle of what was once a butterfly garden -- hopefully the butterflies like the smell of our herbs!  A tree over by the main garden turns out to be a plum tree -- super exciting!  We think another tree in the back yard is some kind of pear tree, and the tree under our streetlights looks to be a cherry of some kind.  We're hoping of course that these are productive and delicious, but for now we are just enjoying the ornamental quality of the beautiful spring blooms throughout our yard!

Possible cherry tree??

Sweet flowering almond bush

Dogwood

Hyacinth among daylilies

Our herb/butterfly garden in front of the farmhouse, at sunset

HAPPY SPRING!

Preparing new garden beds: real-world math problems

We have about half a dozen buckets of wood ash

Now that winter's almost over, Bea's been reviewing some old gardening notes about which are the best organic sources of nutrients to use as soil amendments, and she came across a note that hardwood ash is high in potassium.  That's great news, because Chris has made quite a stash of 5-gallon buckets of stove ashes!  The caveat here is that our starting pH is so low (5.4) that our soil test analysis already recommended adding 13 lbs of limestone per 100 square feet -- so since wood ash is alkaline, we can cut back a bit of the limestone and use the ash as a potassium source without worrying that it will adversely affect our pH.  However, if your pH is where you want it or slightly high, use wood ash sparingly or not at all.

Chris raking in the soil amendments

By now, we have half the beds dug up in the hoophouse and last week (before this most recent round of snow) we were out there prepping our soil and planting our first spring crops!  Since it was helpful to us to review the math that goes into soil amending, we'll go over it here in case it helps anyone else who's ever wondered what those 3 dashed numbers on the bags of fertilizers were for!






1.  Get a soil test!

DON'T bake your soil to make it dry faster,
but old cookie sheets make great drying racks
for soil samples!

This is critical to having a successful garden, but lots of new gardeners skip it, thinking it's difficult or expensive.  You can test your own soil with a basic kit from a hardware store, or send it off to a lab for around $10 to get way more finely-tuned and detailed results.  Historically, we've sent ours to UMass because they were the cheapest, but now that Bea's a Master Gardener through Virginia Tech, we should really encourage use of their soil-testing services!

In true Fixettwell fashion, Bea brought a trowel and handful of ziplock bags to our 2nd appointment to view this farmhouse, stalled Chris from leaving until after our realtor pulled out of the driveway, and then started digging up the lawn in various places to take soil samples!  Oh, and it was pouring down rain.  Luckily, we didn't meet any of the neighbors that day; we would have been such a sight!  The sodden soil she collected took a long while to dry out, so it turned out we had already made an offer on the house by the time we got our results back.  Luckily, they showed no lead or other major issues of concern.  Just good ol' acidic Virginia red clay, as expected.

2.  Interpret your results

If you send your soil samples off to a lab, usually you've specified a crop code of what you intend to grow in each area that was tested so the lab can give you custom-tailored results about what nutrients to add to achieve ideal growing conditions for your selected crop.

In our case, the lab has drawn us a helpful graph to easily visualize what we need and what's already present in sufficient concentration in our soil.

Furthermore, we specified that we want to grow Mixed Home Vegetables so they've adjusted our recommendations accordingly, and tailored our recommendation for “per 100 square feet" as opposed to “per acre".  Be sure to read your results carefully so you're amending with the proper proportions!

Note that the lab hasn't told us specifically which products we should add to achieve desired results, they've told us which nutrients are deficient and what we need to do to adjust our pH.  This is where the decisions and the math come in!

3.  Decide which soil amendments to use
Since we're gardening organically despite not having to worry about certifications, we're limiting our choices to products approved for use in organic farming.  Some common organic sources of major and minor nutrients include:

• pH adjustment – dolomitic limestone – raises pH, also contains calcium and magnesium
• Nitrogen – finished compost, composted manure, alfalfa meal, dried blood
• Phosphorus – bone meal, rock phosphate, soft rock (colloidal rock phosphate)
• Potassium – wood ashes, greensand, azomite
• Micronutrients – individual nutrients, kelp meal, azomite

Look at that smile!  Truckaroni is happy
to be running and put to work again!

Last month, Bea looked in our shed and took stock of which amendments we had left over from previous years gardening.  She then took the truck up to Southern States to buy what we still needed, including 400 lbs of limestone.  This turned out to be a total disaster because you go in and tell the clerk you want limestone and they ring you up, then you take the receipt out to the warehouse where they load you up.  Well, it was raining and Bea decided to act like a Southern girl and stay warm & dry in the truck while the guys loaded it, so she got home with 400 lbs of what turned out to be a type of chemically-treated limestone that's apparently meant for water filtration, definitely NOT for organic gardening!  Luckily she realized this before unloading the truck.  Still, it sat there for a couple of weeks with us being too embarrassed to go exchange such a large order.  Then we got over ourselves and went back to beg forgiveness and get an exchange, so the poor warehouse guys had to unload 400 lbs of one type of lime and reload 400 lbs of the correct type.  The warehouse guy only had one bag explode on him during the process.  Somehow Chris also managed to lock the keys in the truck (a first!) so we had to sit around the parking lot for 2 hours waiting on AAA to come bail us out.  Certainly not our best day in history, but we survived.  Luckily there are 3 Southern States within the same radius of us so we don't have to show our faces there again!

Anyway, based on our analysis and on what we have available, we decided to add limestone, bone meal, and wood ash, plus of course plenty of compost to boost nitrogen and organic matter.

4.  Do the math!

Any fertilizer (organic or conventional) will have an “analysis” shown somewhere on the bag (these are the 3 numbers with dashes between them).  The numbers stand for the percentages of N-P-K (Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium) contained in the fertilizer.  For example, our 10 lb bag of bone meal has an analysis of 4-12-0, which means that 4% of the 10 lbs or 0.4 lb of pure N, 12% of 10 lbs, or 1.2 lbs of pure Phosphorus, and 0% of 10 lbs, or 0 lbs of pure potassium are contained in the bag.

Since our soil test analysis recommends adding ¼ lb of phosphorus per 100 square feet, we need 0.25 lbs of pure phosphorus from our source – in this case the bone meal. We just calculated that in the full 10 lb bag we have 1.2 lbs of pure phosphorus, so simple division shows us that in each pound of bone meal we have 0.12 lbs of pure phosphorus. We then need to apply about two pounds of bone meal to get the recommended ¼ lb of pure phosphorus (0.25/0.12 = 2.0833333 lbs, but we're rounding for simplicity).

Since we don't have a scale set up in the hoophouse, we convert this weight to volume.  Rather than come up with a ratio of weight-to-volume, we just used our handy kitchen scale to weigh a clean yogurt-tub (quart) full of each amendment.  In the case of bone meal, the yogurt tub weighed 2 lbs -- so we need to apply 1 yogurt-tub-full of bone meal to each 100 square feet of garden area in the hoophouse!

We did similar math for our wood ash, although since it's in 5 lb buckets and obviously wasn't labeled with any analysis, we googled the analysis (0-1-4) and just weighed the yogurt-tub full to figure out how much we'd need to get our recommended application rate of 0.1 lbs of potassium per 100 square feet.

5.  Prepare your beds

Remove sod

Add compost

Dig the beds deeply

Soil amending should be the last thing you do right before you plant so your plants/seeds get the maximum benefit.  In our case, we had to remove sod, add piles of compost, dig that deep down into the beds, and then rake everything smooth (removing quite a lot of small rocks and breaking up chunks of clay in the process).  We treat compost as a necessity to be added every year, and then add other amendments near the surface as recommended on the soil test.

6.  Spread your amendments

When applying amendments, you want to sprinkle the recommended amount of fertilizer as evenly as possible over the full 100 square feet.  Then take a rake and lightly sift the amendments into the top 3 inches of the garden bed. 

7.  Plant your seeds!
Once your beds are prepped and ready, you're ready to plant!

Newly prepped and planted beds of root crops, onions, & spring greens

Then we just had to repeat the process on the other half of the hoophouse!