Saturday, March 26, 2016

Irrigation Systems

I've been working on designing an irrigation system for my garden. Luckily, a good friend is an engineer, so he knows how to design things like that. I start looking at all the different parts and configurations and my eyes start spinning.
We bought all the parts, starting with 100' of irrigation tubing, and we inserted the female attachment where the garden hose will hook up.

The other end gets closed off so easily with one of these: 

We laid the mainline throughout the garden, no more than about 5 feet from each plant. Adding drip emitters is pretty easy - simply punch a hole in the main line, attach a single barbed coupling to the main line, insert one end of the rubber distribution tubing into the coupling, cut the tubing so it reaches your plant, then attach a 1 gph or 2 gph dripper to the end to deliver water right to the plant. You can see the set up here: 



I only had 1 gph drippers, so sometimes I used a t coupling and attached two rubber tubes, each with a dripper to go to the same plant. I suppose it's more economical to just buy the 2 gph dripper for the larger plants, so I might swap it out in the future. 

For trees, my friend and are experimenting with soaker hose attachments. We cut a length of the 1/2" mainline tubing, and closed off one end with the end closure. On the other end, we attached a coupling to connect directly with the soaker hose, and secured the attachment with a clamp on the soaker hose. 


I inserted an end cap at the end of the soaker hose, also securing it with a clamp. With the 1/2" tube, I poked a hole, inserted the coupling and connected that part to the mainline. 

I've been playing around with this set up in the garden. The problem I'm finding right now is that this particular type of hose, while it doesn't seem to deteriorate and clog up the way the rubber soakers do, it does tend to kink a lot, especially when dealing with a shorter length. I'd cut one long piece to go around several plants, and that one seemed to do okay, but the shorter pieces, like the one above, don't seem to work as well because they don't curve well around the plant, so multiple kinks develop. 
I'm going to get another soaker hose and play around with that a bit, see if it works better. 



Saturday, March 19, 2016

The evolution of a garden

It's amazing to see how a garden evolves, often in unexpected ways. I was looking back over photos from the last few years and found earlier pics of my garden, and I was surprised to see how much it's changed. It sneaks up on you.
Here's a view of the garden just after I'd first created it. You can see all the little baby plants I'd picked up at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. In the back you can glimpse my herb garden. I laid down cardboard and newspaper and smothered all the grass with decomposed granite. This is just 2 short years ago - April 2014. 
And here it is in July 2014, after the house got a fresh coat of paint. I got the tree (a Texas red oak) from TreeFolks - one of the freebies. I love TreeFolks - such a great program for encouraging everyone to plant trees. Wait till you see what that tree looks like today...

 
Whoa! Can you believe this is the same garden? Do you see how happy that little tree is? I know, not super impressive yet, but another two years... it'll be giving us some much-needed protection from the evil July sun.
The beauty of this garden isn't only what I planted intentionally, it's the little surprises that pop up, like that self-sown blue bonnet you can see hugging the corner of the driveway. And many of the plants have sent their seeds scattering all over, so I'm always excited to see the descendants of my first plant generation popping up in unusual places.



Friday, March 18, 2016

Spring Cleaning

I finally got back into the garden today. And I realized I should be a little more diligent about posting! I posted several times in October... then nothing.
Of course, it's harder to post when you're trying to ignore your garden. Sigh.
I wanted a little something to create a homier feel in the front yard, so I made these two hanging baskets with some varieties of sedum and sempervivum. I love it right now-  we'll see how they look in July. I'd imagine they'll still be okay, since they are full-sun plants. But I manage to screw up watering no matter what I do, and that side of the house faces south west - brutal in summer.
We have a lovely red oak that I planted about 2 years ago. It's starting to fill out and look more like a tree, less like a stick. But I think it'll still take a couple of years to really provide much shade and protection from the sun. In the meanwhile, I hope these prove to be resilient.
I love discovering all the animals that live in the garden. I found these bad boys eating my dill. They're swallowtail caterpillars, based on what I could research. I counted about 6 or 7. The neighbor's kids came over and we spent some time studying them. One of the girls asked if she could take one. I gave her a dill plant and told her to plant it in her garden, and perhaps a butterfly will lay an egg on it. 
Today I checked on the plants, and the caterpillars were all gone. Where do they go? These are things that are mysteries to me, in my novice-dom. 
I added a new basil plant this week, a couple of varieties of thyme (orange and lemon!). The parsley is doing great.
Working on installing an irrigation system, possibly tomorrow. I'll post my progress. A friend showed me how to DIY, and I'm really impressed (of course, he's an engineer). Thankfully he's very generous with his time and has been willing to spend hours figuring this out with me.