Our plants are doing well and we spent this Saturday morning planting a black beauty zucchini start, several red marigolds for pest control, and two bush/space-saving butternut squash from seed!
This is an experiment, we’ll see if anything comes up. We were surprised to read that these can also be grown as container plants. If I had a sunnier balcony I would have to consider adding a few to my collection!
From left to right in the front row of the image above we’ve got a red marigold, curly kale, two kinds of Swiss chard, another curly kale, two broccoli plants, and our two Brussels sprouts bookended by another marigold. In the back left we have a barely visible green trellis and several Oregon Sugar Pod snap pea shoots with some nearby marigolds. On the right side from front to back we have the black beauty zucchini and the two stakes behind it mark where the butterbush was seeded. On the far right border there is what appears to be a volunteer sunflower from last year! You can see other people’s gardens in the background and against the border of our garden, as this is a community garden.
You can see coiled around the plants is our drip irrigation system. We use 0.5 inch polyethylene tubing to connect to our water source through a watering timer. We then use 0.25 inch poly tubing to connect to the drip emitters such as these, though we have them in various watering volumes. To make a system like this yourself, you would also need a hole punch, barbed connectors, goof plugs, and the compression end cap. You can use rocks and/or some small metal stakes to hold the drip heads in place. We use a combination of both. This is our third year using the same tubing and supplies, we’ve just purchased a few more plugs, connectors, and emitters over the years. The front part of the system isn’t up and running quite yet because we need to patch a large leak, but hand watering this small number of plants has been manageable. We’ve designed the irrigation system to have two large branches. One will run down the right (east) and front (north) side of the garden, and the other will go along the back (south) side and wrap between the two beds on the left (west) side where herbs usually go. The large coil sitting around the zucchini is actually the branch intended for the west side of the bed, that is just a convenient place to store it for now.
More to come soon including our battle with the little black leaf-chomping flea beetle!
Colorado Garden Eating 