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The Saga Of The Phantom Pooper, Or How To Keep Cats Out Of Your Beans We've had a lot of rain up here in northern California, and I was noticing with great pleasure that my raised beds were draining beautifully -- they were holding water quite well, too, but while the ground around the raised beds was the same muddy slushy mess that comprises the rest of my backyard, the raised beds were keeping the new seedling plants from getting wet feet (so to speak) as they sprouted. And then I started discovering holes in the garden, like the above picture. And I started discovering unpleasant, stinky surprises in those holes. And on one sunny day between rains, I discovered that the area where I'd planted bush bean seeds (specifically Tendergreen, Blue Lake, and Royal Burgundy varieties) had a whole cloud of little bugs hovering over it, a big hole with an unpleasant surprise, and young sprouted seed scattered all over the place. We have a lot of feral cats in the area, and so it w
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Bed layout and Planting Little by little, I'm getting this garden into shape. At this point, all of the beds are filled and the irrigation is installed on each. Now it's time for planting. The complication: I'm trying not to spend lots of $$$ on new seed or live plants. I wanted SOME young plants to transplant, so I got a few, but I didn't get seeds started early enough; right now the only seeds that have successfully been prestarted are eight varieties of tomatoes and one small eggplant. I'm working off of older seeds (some as old as 6 years since packing), so while I expect some germination, I don't expect every single seed to sprout. We'll see how it works out. In the meantime, allow me to show you what's in the ground so far, and lay out a rough idea of some of the plants I'm direct-sowing.., Redbor kale is so pretty, isn't it? Little curly purple leaves! For that matter, Prism kale is also very pretty; a beautif
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Laying Out Irrigation So, when we were planning out the beds and doing the piping, we set up a fixed rigid end with a ball valve so that we could regulate the water in the beds. This was done because, initially, I'd planned on snaking a long piece of soaker hose around the bed. Yesterday, we tested with a long piece of soaker hose, and discovered that it wouldn't work as a singular piece of hose; only about six to eight feet of soaker hose got water coverage before it stopped effectively working. So we redesigned the layout, bought some solid feeder tubing (same diameter, 1/4") and a bunch of T and corner connectors, and laid out a setup like this today. I know, it's not even in there yet; I haven't gotten so finicky as to exactly space it perfectly. We mostly did this to test and see how long it would take for the coverage to even out. This was maybe ten minutes after we'd turned it on. About 25 minutes after we'd turned on the front b
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Construction And Piping And Soil And Rain So, it's been a little bit since I posted the rough plans for the garden and started this, and a lot of stuff has occurred since then (including a whole lot of rain delay, which is something I can't control). So it seems easiest for me to do this post as a catchup post for all of the detail stuff. When planning a raised bed garden, there's a whole lot of debate on what should be used to build the raised beds, but very little debate on the size of them -- most people don't advise going above 4 feet wide, because you want to be able to reach the raised bed from both sides. But what people don't tend to take into consideration is how much space you need between the beds. So before I could even build the beds, I had to start out with laying out the rough spacing; I knew that my garden cart (a Gorilla cart) isn't very wide, but it still had to be able to turn the corners. I figured out that three feet between the be
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Welcome to the Two Rivers Garden! ... or at least, the future Two Rivers Garden. I'm Lori, and I just moved into my new home, which is near both the Feather and Yuba Rivers in northern California. I'm in an area which is dominated by fruit orchards, and which has nearly perfect weather for year-round gardening. I'm an organic gardener who has, for years, been an apartment-dweller, working in small space gardens and rented community garden plots. For all this time, I've been dreaming up my perfect garden. I'm starting small, and going from there; I have visions of fruit trees and grape vines done in espalier surrounding a myriad of raised beds filled with vegetables. But one has to start at the beginning, and in this case, the beginning was mowing down nearly a foot and a half of overgrown grass in the back yard; that part, at the very least, is done. I've begun the process of constructing four raised beds, insofar as I have the parts for the beds themselve
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