Demolition, from last fall.

Day 1, Dirt Work (Feb. 28th)

Days 2 & 3, Layout & Drainage (Mar. 9th)

Days 4 & 5, Drainage & Shade Structure Layout (Mar. 14th)

Days 6 & 7, Shade Structure Construction (Mar. 19th)

Days 8-11, Shade Structure Construction (Mar. 23rd)

Days 12-16, Shade Structure & Demo Table (Mar. 30th)

Days 17-19, More Drainage & Paver Prep (Apr. 5th)

Days 19-20, Gravel & Laying Pavers (Apr. 9th)

Days 21-24, Laying Brick & Pavers (Apr. 17th)

Day 25, First Raised Beds (Apr. 18th)

Days 26-28, More Raised Beds and FINAL Drainage (Apr. 26th)

Days 28-30, FINAL Pavers and Raised Beds (May 2nd)

Raised Bed Soil Mix (May 7th)

Garden Renovation: Almost the End – Soil Mix (May 9th)

Installing the Drip Irrigation (May 15th)

There you have it! Not counting the demolition, that covers 2 1/2 months of garden renovation. Actual days where work was being done looks to total up to about 34 or so. Yikes!

Adding Organic Matter Improves Soil

This is the first problem I noticed. I saw it when the damage was fresh Saturday morning as well. While it is theoretically possible that there was a weak spot on the stem that the wind snapped, I think that the most likely culprit in this case is a cutworm. Cutworms like to wrap around the stems of young seedlings or transplants and chew them off. That is exactly what this looks like. This pepper plant is done for, at this point. We will be replanting this one tomorrow.

This tomato plant is the worst, although I can see 3 or 4 others with similar symptoms. At first glance, most people would say that the plant is wilting and needs a drink of water. Very tempting response! However, there were three things that made me question that immediate reaction. First, while the plant is wilted, there is no sign of leaf scorch or similar damage that there should have been after the warm weekend. Second, I felt the soil a couple of inches down and in felt moist. If the plant can’t get water out of that soil, then it has some type of root damage, but isn’t yet to the point of scorching. Also, the lower leaves were looking rather yellow, which to me says that the plant has either been getting too much water or it is suffering from too few or too many nutrients.

What I am wondering is if in our concern for keeping the soil moist enough for our germinating seeds, we actually OVER-watered the tomatoes last week. As tempting as it is to put more water on a wilty plant, I’m going to try to hold off the watering and see if they will perk up again. If not, we’ve got some plants in reserve to replace the couple sickly looking plants.

It is theoretically possible that these plants were planted in a localized hot spot due to the compost that we used. I haven’t gotten all the results back yet, but I expect some high numbers. Or…maybe the nitrogen has all been leached out…that also causes yellowing. (But not wilting.) Hmm…

It would appear that our drainage system works. On one hand, that’s good. On the other hand, this is the water running out as we were busily trying to get the soil in our raised beds moist enough to plant in on Tuesday. Hmm…

On closer examination, it appears that we may be making compost tea as we try to get the beds thoroughly moist. Not very thrilled with that…both from the nutrient loss standpoint and the sending nutrients into the sewers standpoint. Any ideas? The seeping is too low and slow to really capture that water.

One part of the garden that isn’t fully finished yet is our Wheelchair/Accessible garden. It is still in the planning and design stage. Meanwhile, we have this wheeled container cart holding the spot. Our Horticulture Therapy committee has an eggplant and a pepper in two of the pots right now, and will be adding a tomato shortly.

In the Beautiful Vegetables garden we planted some black sesame. The seeds (not surprisingly!) look like black-colored sesame seeds.

We cut the top 3-4 inches off of the Cardinal Basil plants that we planted on Tuesday. Even though these are a little muddy, they are too good to waste! This is a quick way to get the first basil of the season. Our speaker at Herb Day, Jim Long, also talked about how important it is to constantly be cutting herbs back to keep them flavorful.

Have a great weekend!

A dastardly cucumber beetle! Rather, there were several beetles on several different plants. Normally sighting a single beetle on a plant would not trigger the need for spraying. However, on young transplants and seedlings, cucumber beetles can quickly devour the whole plant. I believe that 1 beetle per plant is in fact the “economic threshold” that triggers spraying. (“Economic threshold” is a term for the population level of insects at which there is likely to be an economic loss if treatment is not done. Determining economic thresholds helps farmers know when to spray and when not to waste the time, money, and chemicals. It is an important concept in sustainable agriculture.)

Another reason to spray with only the sighting of a few beetles (with beetles there’s no guarantee you are going to be able to find them all, and they eat a lot quickly!), is that while these guys are currently enjoying our nightshade family veggies (tomatoes, eggplant, peppers), we just planted a whole bunch of different kinds of cucurbits (vine crops – cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, melons, etc.). As the name “cucumber beetle” might suggest, their preferred snack is cucumbers and other vine crops.

Cucumber beetles can make a good dent in the tomatoes and eggplant, but they will eat the entire plant right down to the ground on a newly germinating cucumber or melon. If we can control them now before the cucumbers start to come up, we should be in good shape.

Another reason to spray for cucumber beetles on young vine crops (in case you needed another) is that these early season cucumber beetles have overwintered from last year, and because of that it is possible that they are carrying a disease called Bacterial Wilt that they can transmit to the new crop. Bacterial wilt is NOT a fun disease to have in your melons (and cucumbers, to a lesser extent). As soon as a cucumber beetle vector (one carrying the disease) takes a bite out of your melon plant it transmits the disease. You won’t know it until mid-summer when your vines have nice, unripened fruit on them, and they suddenly collapse in a wilted heap. And there is nothing you can do about it. The only thing you could have done about it was to spray those cucumber beetles in the early season to prevent them from spreading the disease.

Cucumber beetles are one of the prettier vegetable garden insect pests, and I really kind of like them, in a twisted way. However, to my way of thinking, this is one pest that you want to hit with some type of pesticide early, rather than waiting. If you kill off the first generation (the one that may be carrying disease) then you should have a much lower population for the rest of the summer and a much lower risk of bacterial wilt. The worst case scenario would be waiting to control these insects until you have a large population in early to mid-summer that has been passing Bacterial Wilt to the plants, back to the next generation of beetles, infecting more plants, etc.

So what are your spraying options?

Organic Options: Rotenone (organic, but definitely NOT non-toxic), rotenone/pyrethrin combos, pyrethrin, pyrethrin/neem oil combos, neem oil. (This list is from most toxic and most effective to least toxic and least effective.) On a very low population, the neem oil can work okay, but it is a contact spray, which makes it less effective.

Synthetic Options: Permethrin (or pretty much any product that ends in -thrin and is labeled for use on vegetables). This is the synthetic form of pyrethrin/pyrethrum.

Obviously you would choose your spray based on your personal preferences, your willingness to spray multiple times, and your tolerance for insect feeding and other damage. This is a situation where, still several weeks away from any harvest, I would probably use a stronger product in hopes that I only needed to use it once.

The gals doing the Edible Flowers Garden were so on the ball that they had almost everything planted before I could take more pictures!  Here’s the post with the plan for this garden.

We have a whole bed planned for the cattle panel trellises again this year. Unfortunately, we planned the trellis garden for the landscape paver bed, which is slightly narrower planting space because of the width of the pavers. It makes the space under the trellises narrower and slightly harder to work with. I’m sure it will be fine, but it maybe shouldn’t have been the first choice! Everything in the bed was planted from seed – cucumbers, squash, and melons. Here’s the garden plan if you want to see what we planted.

Here’s a look at the Mexican Garden. We had jicama, Mexican oregano, tomatillos, peppers, and the Red Aztec Spinach ready to transplant. The jicama and some cantaloupe get to fight over the trellis! We also planted black beans and some zucchini. Here’s the map and original post about the plans.

As is tradition, we have an entire raised bed devoted to tomatoes. We are doing the Florida Weave method in half of it and tomato cages in the other half. Although I greatly prefer the Florida Weave method, I think that due to the width of our bed, it is probably not the most efficient use of space with our current layout. Here’s the post about the plans and the varieties we’re growing this year.

Our Family of 4 Garden is smaller this year. It is about 14′ x 4′ as opposed to the 25′ x 4′ that it has been the last few years. We’ll of course take that into account with the dollar amounts we accrue over the season. We’ll also expect lower numbers since we don’t have any spring crops in. Apparently I somehow overlooked writing a post about our plans for the Family of 4 Garden. Here’s a picture of the bed plan:

This is our long plastic lumber bed with the two square second tiers. Half of the bed will be for the Prairie Star Annual Flower trials, and the other half is the Family of 4 Garden. As you can see, we have a pretty limited range of vegetables this year. Green beans, 2 zucchini, 2 cucumbers, 2 tomatoes, and 3 peppers. We should be able to get some fall things in after the beans and maybe after some of the other plants as well.

In the Beautiful Vegetables Garden, the first step was putting up some T posts to use for a bean trellis. We were going to use a wire trellis, but I think they are now planning to use a wire with twine hanging down for the beans. I’ll show more pictures when they get that project done. Meanwhile, here’s the original post with the plans.

I didn’t get an overview picture of the New & Unique Vegetable Garden, but I did take a couple pictures of the Litchi Tomato. It is just starting to develop its prickles, so you can’t really see them yet. I can foresee taking lots of pictures of this cool plant this summer. Here’s the bed plan for the New & Unique Vegetable Garden.

I think that’s it for this round of planting! We still have the 2 herb beds to plant as well as the Prairie Star Annuals (which arrived yesterday afternoon) and some of the containers.

We are using Netafim tubing with in-line emitters every 12 inches. The flow rate is 0.6 gallons per hour.

The first thing we hooked up was this gadget. On the right side you can just see part of the red handle that turns the water on to each bed. To that we connected one of these Nelson irrigation timers. It is a very cheap timer (about $10.50 each) that just mechanically clicks down the minutes. It can be set to run up to 2 hours or set to be “ON” manually. The timer was then connected to the brown connector for the drip line. Don’t forget your teflon tape to keep them from leaking!

The next step was to stretch the drip tubing the length of the bed. We decided to put 3 lines in each bed. We have always had 2 in each bed, but we had trouble keeping them evenly watered. We’re hoping that 3 lines will be better at even watering.

We connected all three lines on each end use “L” and “T” connectors. Here you can see one of the “T” connectors that we were putting in. I should note – it is much easier to put these drip lines together on a warm day than on a cold day. The last time we replaced some lines in was on a cool March morning, and they didn’t want to go together for anything! The upper 70s of yesterday afternoon were perfect.

Here you can see the finished drip line in the treated lumber bed. We secured the lines with the metal “staples.” Because of the way the irrigation spigots are in place, how we connected the drip lines was a little different in each bed.

When we got to the plastic lumber bed that has the second tier on it, we got to try something new! I think that ordinarily it wouldn’t be ideal for the lines to go up and down, but it was only about a 6 inch rise and we have plenty of water pressure! We brought the lines up inside the second level beds, using the “L” connectors to keep the lines straight.

Here you can see all the beds with the drip lines in them. We had all the connectors for the 4 largest beds, and we will hand water the rest until the final pieces come in.

Next up: Planting!

Our tomatoes, peppers, etc have been growing along in my office. They didn’t grow as well this year until I gave them a hit of fertilizer a couple times last week. They are a little smaller than I’d like for them to be, but I think they’ll be fine to go ahead and plant next week after we get the irrigation lines in place.

I thinned out the red shiso seedlings this week. The seeds were so tiny that we planted several in each pot. However, the plants themselves get pretty big, so I snipped out the excess, leaving a single, healthy seedling.

The roselle (hibiscus) and jicama have been outside getting used to the outdoors since the end of the week last week. They are definitely ready to be planted in their permanent homes.

We planted 3 varieties of hanging basket tomatoes last week (before Herb Day). The 3 varieties are ‘Cherry Falls,’ ‘Red Rambling Stripe,’ and ‘Gold Rambling Stripe.’ They have doubled in size since this picture was taken! I haven’t seen any flowers quite yet, but I’m sure we’ll be at that point soon. They are supposed to be trailing varieties, but thus far they are still pretty upright. Something else to keep an eye on!

I also thinned out the Red Aztec Spinach seedlings last week sometime. Same story as with the shiso. If these seedlings look an awful lot like the common garden weed known as Lambsquarter….that’s because they are both in the Chenopodaciae family. They are cousins! (Hey, we could be growing lambsquarter as an edible green too!)

That’s all I’ve got! We are looking forward to getting our drip irrigation in place on Monday afternoon and then planting like crazy on Tuesday morning. We also have our annual spring Master Gardener Garden Tour coming up a week from now, so there should be lots of posts to look forward to next week. (Or lots of things to come out and see in person if you are in the Wichita area!)

Have a great weekend!

Since my last update we have completely filled all of our raised beds with our soil mix and have all the paths mulched. It feels great to be so close to having a complete garden again!

Let’s talk about our raised bed soil mix, and why I don’t recommend that you do what we did. This is definitely a case of “do what we say, not what we do.”

We mixed sand and compost at about a ratio of 3 parts compost to 2 parts sand. Normally, I would not recommend that you use pure sand in a raised bed, for several reasons.

1. First and foremost, a raised bed is supposed to be a method of improving your existing soil, not ignoring your native soil and using something else. I always recommend using your existing soil and adding additional topsoil and compost to fill a raised bed. In this area, most of our soils are clay loams. If you add some sand to a clay loam, you make very nice adobe brick, but not very nice garden soil.  (In our case, we weren’t planning to garden in the existing soil as much as garden ON it, so that wasn’t a consideration.)
2. Raised beds facilitate drainage and cause soil to dry out quickly. Sand drains and dries out quickly without a raised bed, so it could be a challenge to keep it watered.
3. Sand is very poor at holding nutrients. We’ve balanced that with the amount of compost, but it could be several years of adding compost before our raised bed mix is a nice loam instead of a compost & sand mix.
4. Sand in this area of Kansas usually comes out of sandpits, and sandpits often have very salty water in the bottom. Topsoil can also have its own problems, so maybe this is a case of “6 of one, half dozen of another.” No matter what, you should always get a soil test done before planting in a new soil mix!

In our case, we are “creating” new soil from scratch without much intention to use the existing soil at all. That makes the sand not a problem. Also, once we got down to the native soil beneath the clay hard-pack, it is a sandier soil. If you are starting from a clay loam native soil, you probably shouldn’t use sand.

Okay, back to filling the raised beds.

Here’s a big pile of sand.

And a big pile of composted horse manure. Obviously not mixed with the sand yet. The sand arrived first, so we started filling beds with a layer of sand, thinking it would be easier to mix the sand and compost in the beds than in the wheelbarrows.

You can see that we put about 3″ of sand in the bottom of all the beds, and then started mixing compost once it arrived. We also put some of the sand down in the walkways in areas where the gravel was a little thin and also under the edges of the raised beds in spots where we didn’t have enough gravel/soil to get the edges leveled right.

We also took some time to dig down and place some rebar stakes next to the water lines to stabilize them. Since they are now tied in directly to the irrigation main line, the water pressure is crazy high, and we wanted something to hold that plastic more stable.

After the first go-round with the sand and compost, we figured out pretty quickly that it was much easier to do alternating scoops of sand and compost into the wheelbarrows rather than mix in the beds. Much better!

The semi-mixed soil was much easier to work with in the beds!

Here’s the end result. About 20-25 Master Gardener volunteers worked Monday and Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoon to get to this point – beautifully filled raised beds and completely mulched pathways!

As we were getting our sand and compost deliveries, I pulled soil samples of the sand and compost individually and also a bag of mixed sand and compost to get tested. We are testing for pH, N, P, K, Organic Matter, and salt-alkali. The salt-alkali is a test that measures the amount of sodium as a percentage of total soluble salts. Because of the sand, I wanted to make sure everything is in good shape before we get too far along. When we get the results back, I’ll be sure to fill you in on what we find!

Our remaining garden renovation tasks include:

• Installing the drip irrigation lines
• Construction of the handicap accessible raised bed (details TBD…this may not be very soon)
• Installing permanent signage (developed over the course of the year)
• Installing signage for each bed in some form

Of course, we will also quickly be moving into our regular pattern of gardening (and blogging) as we hopefully can get some planting done in the next couple of weeks.

This particular raised bed we got a donation from Gard’n'Wise to try one of their specially packaged raised bed soil mixes. We certainly don’t recommend that you HAVE to use a mix like this (we aren’t for the rest of them!). It will be fun to try it and see how it works though.

We put about 5 inches of woodchips in the bottom of the raised bed, because we didn’t have quite enough of the bagged soil mix to fill it completely full. They will break down over time and we can add more compost to the top to make up the difference.

Here you can see the list of ingredients in the mix. I don’t know how it holds water, so I’m not sure I agree with the bag’s recommendation as ideal for container gardening. Maybe it would work well for some of those big, Smart Pots that we tried a couple years ago. It is a mixture of topsoil, cotton burr compost, coconut coir, expanded shale (kind of like gravel, but popped like popcorn), humate, and several different types of ground rock/sand. I’ll be curious to see how it tests when we run the soil tests on it.

It actually looks kind of disgusting, if you think about it too much. The long fibers are most likely the coconut coir. You can also see a couple of the expanded shale rocks on the left side. Otherwise, just a nice, light (relatively) mix of soil. Definitely not as light as a normal soilless potting mix, but lighter than your average, mineral garden soil. I wonder if we will have trouble keeping it moist in a hot year?

There you have it! Our first filled raised bed. Now we are guaranteed at least one 16 sq. ft. area in which to garden this year.