Squash Alert

So it's getting hot here and the squash don't like it. They tend to go limp during the heat of the day and then perk up again once it cools down. I would think that this would stress them out so I'm going to water them a little more frequently. I think once their roots get down to the reservoir they will be a little less vulnerable to the heat.


With the leaves so limp you can see inside to the little treasures. The Golden Glories are coming along.


And the green zucchini is almost ready for dinner.

Squash

The squash are getting bigger and sending out flowers.


I think the male flowers come out first. The female flowers are the ones that fruit.

I already had to shift them a little to give them more room to grow. I also just watered them again for the first time in about 3 weeks. I suppose that as the plants get bigger they will suck up more water, but for now they require very little attention.


The acorns are doing the best. I still haven't thinned them out. It's harder for me to do than I anticipated.

Self Watering Containers

The squash seedlings seem to be doing pretty well. The one that I'm most excited about is a butternut called Betternut 401. I had high expectations for it because of the name but so far it has been a slow starter. It's the smallest one in this container.

It was the last to sprout and is smaller than all of the others. I love butternut squash soup so I'm hoping that it catches up soon. It's sharing this container with a green and a yellow zucchini.



This container has a variety of acorn squash. They are getting to the point where I can no longer postpone culling the weaker seedling. I should just buckle down and do it. They seem to have settled in well and look ready to put on a burst of growth. We've had cool, cloudy weather lately but it doesn't look like it is inhibiting them.

Self Watering Containers

I finally got all of the supplies together to make some self watering containers. I actually got the bins a year or so ago but it took me a while to gather everything else. I'm using instructions from a guy named Josh that patterned his after commercially available containers.

The goal with a self watering container is to create a reservoir in the bottom of the container so that you don't have to water as frequently. In the hot summer I have to water the vegetables every day so this could be a great time saver. I also like that I can put them wherever I want. Right now I'm limited to the raised bed and some things take up a lot more space than they do dirt so it seems a little inefficient. I figured I could put the squash in these and if they start getting really big I can just move the containers apart. I can't do that in the raised bed.

Josh used pond baskets to create a wick from the reservoir but I couldn't find those so I used these containers from the fridge. I probably should have cleaned them out a long time ago anyways.


I also got some PVC pipe and a couple more bins.

It was only after I got home from the store that I read Josh's note that he no longer uses pvc. I guess that makes sense but I was unwilling to let anything interrupt my momentum after it took me a year to get started. Luckily he recommended some substitutions, one of which was copper pipe.

It just so happens that I had a pile of copper pipe. Not because I did any un-permitted plumbing work or anything. : /

I found three pieces that where long enough. I just needed to trim some bends off of one.

So I got to cutting and drilling and nipping. The reservoir is created by cannibalizing one of the bins. You cut off the bottom few inches and that gets flipped over and wedged into the bottom of another.


The yogurt container are filled with dirt and sit in the reservoir to draw water up to the plants above.


The pipe goes down into the reservoir so you can fill it from the top. I notched the bottom so the water could flow out easily.



To fill the containers I used a mixture of litter from the chicken coop, a commercial water control potting mix and perlite.


Here you can see the reservoir as it's covered with dirt.

I cut holes in the lid for the plants and added dirt until it came right to the top. I'm hoping that this will hold in more moisture.


I have a funnel but even with the smaller diameter copper pipe it's easy to fill.


There's a small drain hole at the bottom to keep it from getting too soggy.


I moved my precious baby squash into the containers. I know I'm supposed to weed out the weak seedling and leave the strong one to grow but it's hard for me to do. I convinced myself that I should wait to see how they adjust to their new circumstance and then make the decision.

I realized that most of my squash is winter squash so I pick up a green zucchini at the store. I also planted twice as many of the Golden Glory which is a yellow zucchini. Some of the seedlings already have little baby flowers on them. I think the first flowers are male so it will still take awhile before they start to grow fruit.

One of the reasons I'm trying these containers is that I'd like to have a little more diversity in my growing space. With only one bed I tend to have a Summer season and a Winter season where I let everything grow until it's done and ready to be pulled out. This doesn't feel very efficient and it leaves me with many months where things are just growing in and not producing. Ideally I'd like to have more overlap so that there are always mature vegetables in the garden.

I'll have to plan much better and start my seedlings earlier. I was reading another blog where someone was already picking their first harvest of tomatoes. I just planted mine, and although I had wanted to put them in their own SFC I ended up putting them in the raised bed where they can fight for space with the giant Swiss Chard.

I'd like to make better use of this space. It makes me happy to see all of my potted plants but I think it would make me just as happy to see a bunch of vegetables growing. I could move my patio furniture over to the shadier part of the yard and build a couple more beds here. I'd love to cut out the concrete and have more dirt to work with.

Everything takes time and money though. Speaking of which, after adding up the cost for the bins, the perlite, and the potting mix, the SWCs ended up costing me $24 each. That kind of sounds like a lot to me. The commercial ones sell for about $50 dollars. I guess the final verdict won't be in until I see how well things grow in them. I'm a little concerned about how these will hold up in the sun. When I lived in Vegas, anything vinyl or plastic that sat in the sun got brittle and cracked after awhile. If these things cracked I would be pissed. Maybe I should make little shade cozies for them until the squash leaves shade them.

It would be great if I could have ten of these that could always be in rotation. That adds up fast though and would take a lot of dirt and time. Just like they cost more than I would have expected they also took me longer to make than I predicted. Between buying supplies, hauling and mixing dirt, cutting and assembling, and planting the seedlings it probably took me 6 hours to get these done. I would have had to do some of that work even if I just bought them but $50 is sounding more and more reasonable.

Erik and Kelly at Root Simple have a version of these made out of 5 gallon buckets. I guess if I could get 20 buckets for free it might be worth it. They would also be a nice size for growing tomatoes, peppers, and other bushy things. Maybe I'll start making the rounds of donut shops to see if they have any extra strawberry filling buckets.

Seedlings

I planted some squash seeds a couple weeks ago. I ordered a bunch of powdery mildew resistant varieties. I've had pretty good luck with my squash every year but because of our cold nights they always develop mildew halfway through the season. We'll see how these do. I got some yellow zucchini, a couple of hybrid acorns, a fancy weird pumpkin, and my favorite, butternut. They are all winter squash except for the zucchini but even the zucchinis I've grown have over wintered pretty well.


After two weeks the seedlings are just starting to push their way out.



And this is 3 days later. Yowza!

I planted a lot more than I need hoping that I can give some away. I have a lot more seeds stored in the fridge too. The minimum order for each kind was about 250 seeds and so far I've only used about 10 so if anyone is interested in trying these out let me know.


While I was in the seed planting mood I decided to give these Echium wildpretii seeds a try.




I put two or three seeds in each little container and then covered them with a little more dirt. I had about 60 seeds.


The instructions said to cover them with plastic until they germinate. I kind of want to hide them somewhere where I won't have to see them all the time. I'm dying of anticipation.


This is what they look like when they bloom in their second year:

!!
Wish me luck.

Update 5/03/11:

It's been a couple weeks and the squash are still doing well. They are getting their true leaves now. I have to figure out where I'm going to put them. I'm going to make some self-watering containers but I'd like to choose an out of the way place for them. Most of them are bush varieties and not viney but I don't really know what to expect. The first year I grew butternut the whole front yard was covered in it. The vines must have been 35 feet long. I can't image having ten times that amount.

After two weeks I also found this this morning:

It's one little Wildpretii seedling. See it there by the edge of the pot?

By the time I got home tonight there were 4 move just popping out:

They're still not much to look at but I'm encouraged that they're sprouting. I wasn't sure what to expect and was getting a little discouraged that nothing had popped out. I guess the squash took two weeks too. I'm really going to have to work on my patience if I'm going to wait two years for these to bloom.

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.