How does my garden grow?
Got the broccoli & kale starts planted, hauled some junk off the back porch to the dumpster, and put together a brick-surrounded mini planting bed where the last of the 2-year-old snap pod pea seeds got planted.
This morning went out to dig around in my giant planting box & it seems to have been invaded by this underground white spiderweb stuff? Its the color of ash, it looks like spiderwebs under the ground, and I have NO IDEA what it is.
I suspect that its some kind of mushroom, but seeing as i'm not a mycologist i can't say that with any certainty.
SO! Having been looking at instructions online talking about how to build your own self-watering containers, i've been contemplating deconstructing my big wooden box & coming up with a system that relies on 5-gallon food service buckets modified into a container garden.
Which requires a little thought. I'm contemplating some kind of wheeled platform to hold them all - but then again, if I leave the handles on, I can just pick them up & move them if I need to shift things.
Also contemplating linking all the buckets together into a self-levelling system - so I just water one, & it fills all the others in the process. Just like filling an ice cube tray. Thing is, if I do that, it wouldn't be that easy to just pick them up & move them around. In that scenario, i would definitely want a cart to hold them all.
Then there's the "whiney condo assoc" concern - having a container garden of buckets, while on the back porch, might attract complaints if anyone wanders around back & wants to whine. (Although I suppose I could make drawstring "bucket skirts" to disguise them... Or just paint the things bright & obnoxious colors.)
Of course the other benefit of building a cart & making an interconnected self-watering system is that I could build trellis supports into the cart, that I could easily turn into a "greenhouse" type system in the winter. (Which would be covered with plastic sheeting, which I could angle so it sheds water into some kind of gutter which could then feed into the reservoir under the plants, so it would both water the plants AND protect them from the cold & potential drowning. So I could have kale & brussels sprouts well into the winter.)
The first engineering question, however, is what to use *INSIDE* the buckets to hold the dirt up out of the reservoir; what to use to allow the water to wick up slowly; and what to use to connect the individual buckets so the water level equalizes before overflowing. So I think I need to do some poking around for cheap hardware-store type items...
This morning went out to dig around in my giant planting box & it seems to have been invaded by this underground white spiderweb stuff? Its the color of ash, it looks like spiderwebs under the ground, and I have NO IDEA what it is.
I suspect that its some kind of mushroom, but seeing as i'm not a mycologist i can't say that with any certainty.
SO! Having been looking at instructions online talking about how to build your own self-watering containers, i've been contemplating deconstructing my big wooden box & coming up with a system that relies on 5-gallon food service buckets modified into a container garden.
Which requires a little thought. I'm contemplating some kind of wheeled platform to hold them all - but then again, if I leave the handles on, I can just pick them up & move them if I need to shift things.
Also contemplating linking all the buckets together into a self-levelling system - so I just water one, & it fills all the others in the process. Just like filling an ice cube tray. Thing is, if I do that, it wouldn't be that easy to just pick them up & move them around. In that scenario, i would definitely want a cart to hold them all.
Then there's the "whiney condo assoc" concern - having a container garden of buckets, while on the back porch, might attract complaints if anyone wanders around back & wants to whine. (Although I suppose I could make drawstring "bucket skirts" to disguise them... Or just paint the things bright & obnoxious colors.)
Of course the other benefit of building a cart & making an interconnected self-watering system is that I could build trellis supports into the cart, that I could easily turn into a "greenhouse" type system in the winter. (Which would be covered with plastic sheeting, which I could angle so it sheds water into some kind of gutter which could then feed into the reservoir under the plants, so it would both water the plants AND protect them from the cold & potential drowning. So I could have kale & brussels sprouts well into the winter.)
The first engineering question, however, is what to use *INSIDE* the buckets to hold the dirt up out of the reservoir; what to use to allow the water to wick up slowly; and what to use to connect the individual buckets so the water level equalizes before overflowing. So I think I need to do some poking around for cheap hardware-store type items...