Straw Bale Gardenning

 Squash and Beans

Tomatoes and more squash

Seeds

While I was in a seed planting mood I decided to get some things going for the winter garden. I planted all my favorites.



I put them on the Northeast side of the house. They'll get sunlight until about noon and then be in the shade for the hottest part of the day. I think it's just the heat and moisture they need right now to germinate. Once they start to grow I may try to find a better place for them.


The cover's steamed up right away.


Update 8 days later:

Beans and peas


Beats and raddishes


Chard and cabbage


One little Echium fatuosum out of all those seeds. :/

Potato Towers/Chicken Spa

Despite what it looks like, this isn't a pile of dead chickens.


Chickens love to take dustbaths and they love to do it communally. Out of the whole dusty yard they choose to do it in the tires I use for growing potatoes. The idea is that you start with one tire and as the plant grows you stack another tire on top and fill it with dirt. This encourages the plant to grow a longer stem or something and produce more potatoes. I've put off planting the seed potatoes because the chickens have been spending so much time in their little tire spa.


I figure that since they all like to bathe together, roman style, they can make do with one tire.

I've had a plate of sprouted potatoes sitting on the dining room table for weeks now so I threw them into the two back tires.


Then I filled them up to the rim with dirt and compost and stacked the next tire one top.


I think this will keep the chickens out.


This I'm not so sure, but I didn't have anymore hardware cloth, so the tomato cage will have to do.


They seem happy with the arrangement:

Vegetabable Bed 1

So I cleared out the last of the Summer vegetable bed. All that was left was a scraggly tomato that was late to ripen and an unexpected bonus.


a giant mushroom.


It looked a little like a portobello but I was scared to eat it.


It would have made a pretty decent meal

Vegetable Bed 2

After getting rid of all the giant fungus I was ready to put in the winter bed. As usual I was running late and chose to put in started plants rather than growing from seeds. One day I'll get my act together and plan all of this better.

I put in some cabbage, lettuce, broccoli, brussel sprouts, and chard. They always look so small when they go in.

This shot was taken about mid morning and already the bed was in shade. In the winter the sun is so low in the sky that it gets blocked by this beast:

The bougainvillea is pretty but it's so aggressive and thorny. It also has aspirations to take over the whole yard. I haven't cut it all the way back yet because it offers nice screening from my next door neighbor, but it needs a lot more maintenance before I feel like I'm the boss of it and not the other way around.

I decided that now was as good a time as any to try to tame it. I feel like I cut a bunch off but there is still a long way to go.


Before:


After:

I feel like there's almost no difference. I think I need a taller ladder.

By the time I was done the bed was completely in shade. I'm hoping my trimming will give it a couple more hours of sunlight a day.


I managed to get it all in the green bin. Normally I would try to chop it up and compost it but it's just too thorny and woody and I wanted to be rid of it. I'll let the city run it through one of their big shredders.

Good riddance.

Vegetable Bed 3

The Winter bed has filled in nicely and is being admired by this pullet. There is bird netting that goes flat across the sides to keep her kind out but now that the plants are bigger the pullet can reach through and nip off the new growth that is pushing against the net.

That doesn't bother me that much but sometimes she jumps on the net like a trampoline and breaks the stems of the lettuce.

It also seems like it's time to make more room. The broccoli is pushing for more space and the butter lettuce is bolting right through the net.


Here you can see the garlic where the chickens have taken a little off the top.


I decided to expand the netted area with pvc tubing.


I used 1" diameter tubes as sleeves and attached them to the sides of the bed.



The rails are made from two 5' pieces of 1/2" joined by a corner piece.


They slide into the sleeves easily but the tension keeps them tight and upright. I was impressed with how rigid they were.


I wasn't expecting it to looks so much like a covered wagon. I kinda love it.


I had more netting that was thrown over the top and secure with screws at the bottom.


Hopefully everything has enough room for a while.

Vegetable Bed

I don't have a lot of flat space around my house so this little patch is pretty valuable. Part of it is taken up by the chicken tractor that has since become the brooder coop. My first two chickens were happy with it as long as they could run around in the yard too.

I decided to try to get a little more use out of the space and build a raised planter for vegetables


I built it out of 2x10s, with hardware cloth on the bottom.


This is to keep the gophers out. I first time I saw the gophers I thought they were kinda cute. Then I watched one pull an entire creeping fig vine into its burrow after it had eaten all of its roots. Now I plant everything with mesh around it.


I filled it with two truck loads of free compost from the Griffith Park Composting Facility. John likes to joke that it is full of elephant dung because the facility is right over the hill from the LA Zoo. It might be true. This stuff is like black gold.


I can never get my act together to grow from seed so I used started plants from home depot. I planted tomatoes, squash, cucumbers and threw in some radish and beet seeds. They look so dainty here, but I had planted way too much. My friend Sora warned me that the tomatoes and squash were going to battle for supremacy. She wasn't kidding.


I'm not sure who the winner was. The squash took up more space but the tomatoes lasted longer. I was still getting tomatoes just a month ago, and I still have butternut squash waiting to be made into soup.


My plans were to clean this all out and plant a winter garden but I never got around to it. Once the squash was gone there were little radish plants trying to grow underneath. They ended up getting big and bushy with gnarly twisted radishes about a foot long.

The last batch of chicks did a pretty good job of cleaning the bed out before they went up to the big house. Now I just need to replant. I'm thinking that this year I'll grow the tomatoes and squash in their own self watering containers and reserve the raised bed for vegetables that are a little more delicate.