Yes – as posted earlier, you can start cool weather crops in the summer – middle of a heat wave in fact, as long as you can keep the soil moist.  By covering the soil with a light mulch and watering enough to keep the soil from crusting, the seedlings have the right environment to sprout.  Be sure to move the mulch (but don’t remove it, just push it in between the rows) so the plants don’t get shaded, or stay too moist.  Here, we have started broccoli during our 95+ degree weather.  The carrots are starting to show up too!  Keeping the cooler weather crops cool will be a matter of shading them with some shade cloth or moving a potted plant nearby, such as a comfrey plant or possibly moving the box under one of the patty pan squash canopies for now, moving them out when the weather breaks.  Lettuce can be started in the heat of...

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Day 80 – When a Wicking Bed Goes Bad

2011/07/20

It appears there is a leak in the plastic under the wicking bed.  Within hours of filling it (twice), the reservoir is empty.  The potatoes at the end appear to be missing the water, too – they are turning yellow and wilting.  Fortunately, I have some extra soaker hoses that I just placed there, and much of the “extra” water will be absorbed by the now rotting wood chips that were the medium above the plastic that was there to “break up the surface tension and help facilitate wicking”. The box beds are starting to catch up to the lasagna beds as far as yield is concerned, with the wicking bed taking a break to flower like mad and the hugelkultur bed following suit, though there was the one patty pan squash that was ready for a salad, and thus picked. I am hearing the water pump working away in the cellar, and it’s been an hour of soaker...

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Day 78 – Patty Pan Squash are Starting to Emerge!

2011/07/18
Patty Pan Squash with Flowers

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Gardenhacker Gauges!

2011/07/17
image of garden gauges as of 7/17/2011

There is an interesting way to share information via Google, using spreadsheets and charts, you can (according to Google) “put this code into any web page” and voila! There’s your chart – right there! So far, I haven’t been able to get it to work, but you can see our “Gardenhacker Gauges” – showing the yield per bed type in ounces. If you’ve been following our blog at all, you know that the current winner is the lasagna bed, which has had the most amendments (aged manure, grass clippings, compost), with the other beds mostly having garden soil that layed fallow for two years, transported to the respective beds.

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Day 76 – Beans and Peas and a New Garden Experiment

2011/07/16
Day 76 – Beans and Peas and a New Garden Experiment

The new garden experiment is: Miracle-Gro Garden Mix vs 1 part soil, 1 part Manure. Facing south, the left box is the Miracle-Gro, the right is the soil-manure mix. In the manure pile, there was some well aged manure (no smell, as opposed to the fresher, smellier variety that I’d dug, then dumped and left there) which I screened – one shovel full manure, then one shovel full soil, mixed well, and put into the test bed/box. Ran out of seeds before I finished planting the soil/manure box, so sprouting will be a little sparse there. I find it is extremely easy to make a new garden experiment using boxes to separate the different soils.  As these experiments are of the “home grown variety”, I have not separated the boxes with a barrier of soil between them as would be proper in scientific experiments. Once the frost has taken hold later (the later the better!) this year, I will...

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Day 71 – Potatoes

2011/07/11
Four beds of potatoes with little difference between them. - gardenhacker.com

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