Borouz Woodworking

We love our greenhouses.  They aren’t fancy.  They weren’t expensive.  They are cheap.  But they’ve given us some protected areas for starting and growing a variety of plants.

While we love them, the door zippers are frustrating.  They are the cheapest, weakest, most poorly made zippers I believe on the whole planet.  Every tab broke off of them, so I had to use a piece of twine tied to the tab loop in order to close them.  The cover is stretched so tightly over the frame that there was a lot of stress put on these zippers, causing them to be very difficult to close, and they would separate under the stress.  Numerous teeth broke, making zipping and unzipping very difficult.  We knew early on that we would be building something to replace these doors.

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Once again,  the tomatoes got completely out of control before we got a decent trellis up for them.  Seems to happen every year.  One year I will have this made before the tomatoes are 8 feet tall!  We put the tomatoes along the back fence of our new garden area, six 8′ x 2′ x 1′ high raised garden beds.  There are also two of these beds on the front fence, next to the gate.  The idea this year was to plant our raspberries in these beds, but long before we got to that, the tomatoes needed to be planted.

Instead of filling these beds with soil, we decided to use 10 gallon grow bags placed inside of the bed with one tomato plant in each bag.  The idea was that later we could move the beds around without having to shovel dirt out of them.  Once the tomatoes were done just pick the bags up and move the bed.  When we did this in the spring we thought the layout of the beds would be changing.  After living with it we might actually leave the layout the way it is.  Bags in beds gave us options.  Soil in bags can dry out faster than soil in beds, but having the bags in the beds might actually have helped to minimize that issue.

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This year we moved a lot of our raspberries, some to a row of raised beds at the lower part of what we call the berry room, and the rest of the black raspberries that were still in 22 gallon tubs to the top of the hill in the berry room.  The golden and red raspberries, blackberries, loganberries, and currants were moved to the new garden area by the fruit trees.  This left the blueberries where they were.  This was mainly because 6 of the blueberry plants are in a raised bed.  Three of them are still in the 22 gallon tubs, and we could have moved them, but decided to keep all of the blueberries together.  Well, except for the 2 in the greenhouse.

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We love our greenhouses.  They were not expensive, they went up quick, we have been able to move them by picking them up and walking them to their new locations and they help us to extend our season and save things in the winter time.  Did they save everything like I had hoped, no.  None of the hardy mums made it.  But we still love them.  Last year when it got warm I clipped bug netting to the two doors.  It worked, sort of, a white fly issue got out of control.  It did keep out larger bug pests, cats, a dog, birds, and our own chickens.

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When we moved here I had a dream.  I had been picturing land, animals, gardens, raising our own food and being able to breathe.  I won’t say that there were no Disney style cartoon birds and woodland creatures helping do the work while I sang, in my mental picture.  I will say that Bill probably would describe my ideas and also use the word mental.

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In this article, I will discuss the setup I use to add drip irrigation to large pots and grow bags.  I put drip rings of various sizes in bags and containers.  I make these rings to fit the container and provide consistent water to them.

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One of the things we like best about raised beds is the ability to work without having to bend down to or get down on the ground.  As we get older, this becomes a much bigger issue.  We have found that with a 2 foot high raised bed, we can bring a lawn chair up to the bed and work on it while seated.  This allows us to spend more time working without tremendous discomfort or pain.

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6 years ago (has it only been six years?  Wow!), our initial “raised bed” garden was a fenced in area behind the shop.  The beds were about 8″ tall 4′ by 4′,  made with wood that we had milled from our trees and we used the square foot method.  I loved my garden.  I would throw a board across the top of two beds and sit there and weed, listen to the birds and the wind and just be happy.  Time passed, life happened, and I went through a little time where my health was not great.  I thought gardening had passed me by.

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