Good thing I started the garden early so all the neighborhood animals know where they can get a free breakfast! The carrot tops are gone, some of the cucumbers plants, the bok choy, and the broccoli. There are still a lot of seeds left, though, and it’s early, so I’ll keep planting. Meanwhile, I set up the live trap and filled the back with a lot of hopefully irresistible carrot tops. If the culprits are squirrels we’ll never catch them all.
I’m still keeping an eye out for other diverse vegetable seeds to plant. Sustainable farming incorporates diversity to keep the ecosystem thriving and, even on a smaller scale, it is fun to grow and experiment with food that you don’t see at the major markets. I have a couple of raised beds that will stay unplanted until later in the season, so we can harvest multiple times, and at least one bed per year (rotated) will get a cover crop to keep the soil full of nutrients. I’m using crop rotation so nothing gets planted in the same place twice, and adding compost to keep the soil and plants healthy. This weekend we worked on setting up rain barrels to collect water to reuse on the garden.
We’ve set up two different types of barrels. First, a traditional wooden barrel. You can find these around – do some searching online. We found a guy on Craigslist who had some relationship with the owner of an old distillery and he had a lot of barrels for sale. Tony ordered a diverter kit online that he attached to the downspout by making a cut and inserting it. You don’t want a whole-house roof going directly to the barrel because they fill fast and then you have water pooling around your foundation; most of the water stays in the downspout.
I like to put the more eye-appealing barrels toward the house; then behind the shed I’m fine with collecting water in a plastic barrel. This second barrel isn’t very attractive but a nice feature is that it’s collapsible so we can roll it back up and stow it in the shed over the winter. With either type of barrel you have a hole in the top to collect the water, and a spigot at the bottom to attach a hose or drain the water into a watering can or bucket. As soon as we attached a downspout to the gutter, and cleaned out some leaves, the water started collecting in the barrel. The barrel is too close to the ground in the photo; we’re going to raise is up about a foot for convenience. Tonight we’re supposed to get showers, so we’ll have an extra 50 gallons of water for the garden by morning!
