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.
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.
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.
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.
We have a large number of the big heavy duty 27 gallon totes that we store things in. Things like the boys’ stuff that they don’t use or don’t have a place for. With Sam in Okinawa, and having only taken 3 sea bags with him, we have all of his stuff in these totes.
Bill originally built the shaker deck to help harvest potatoes. For years we have grown potatoes in bags, not in ground, not in raised beds. It just works better for us. We will probably never get the huge harvests that other methods provide but we are happy. Frankly happy is a pretty good outcome for anything that you do in life. The shaker deck made bag harvest simple and quick. We could work through 50 bags in a short amount of time and not miss a single spud. This year we put the shaker deck to work breaking up bags of dirt and adding amendments to reclaim the dirt.
Having a greenhouse always seemed to be an out of reach dream. The entry cost was prohibitive. We struggle with flat land up here. We also struggle with sunlight and a fear of trees. Case in point yesterday I was out looking at the grapes and found a rather large limb laying in between two of the beds. It had hit the wire and mercifully missed damaging the grapes themselves. One tree, with branches that slightly overhang the driveway, had managed to land on our grapes. Imagine if that had been a glass structure, or even plexi glass. You might say, well that flimsy film with light weight aluminum poles will get smashed too, and you would be right. The difference is in the money invested and ease of repair.
For years we have wanted to create an enclosed space for the sawmill. To keep it out of the weather and allow us to work regardless of the weather. We would watch videos of people who had built buildings to house their mills , with hearts in our eyes, if only. Those people typically had some large piece of equipment to hoist their log onto the mill and move stacks of milled lumber to the kiln. Alas we have only two old people and a hand crank system. In the absence of any kind of “building” we have tried a number of alternatives with varying degrees of “well that didn’t work”.
Everything in the basement got big and needs to go out. The weather here has been hot then cold then hot again. Rain, hail, strong winds and some frost at night have all taken their turn in the forecast. Add to that near or above 80 degree sunny days and we moved right out of greenhouse weather to bug net weather.
I would love to report that the battle is mine! That would be a lie. Everyday when I go down and check there are spider mites, mostly on the same plants. Watching while flats of growing things melt into dust can take the wind out of even the most optimistic person’s sails.
