An Experiment in Scotch

It’s get­ting damn hot lately so it’s a lot eas­ier to write about the gar­den than actu­ally, you know, gar­den. So while it’s not tech­ni­cally sum­mer yet, here’s a lit­tle taste of what’s been going in The Experiment’s home garden.

For the first time, I’m track­ing yields as a way to objec­tively com­pare changes and tin­ker­ings in my sys­tem. It’s been a fun exer­cise and on aver­age, we’ve har­vested some­thing every other day in June. I started track­ing yields on spring and sum­mer veg­gies as they are more amenable to the exer­cise. Yields on cab­bage tend to be three when you plant three plants. That’s not ter­ri­bly excit­ing. So far, since May 22nd, we have har­vested 2.28 pounds of zuc­chini (and since the plant is now dead, that’s all we’ll get), 9.32 pounds of slic­ing cucum­bers, .28 pounds of pick­ling cucum­bers, 1 ounce of ser­rano pep­pers, 3.25 ounces of banana pep­pers, 4.75 ounces of jalapenos and 3.75 ounces of yel­low tomatoes.

Grow­ing cucum­bers on a trel­lis (see pic­tures below) makes all the dif­fer­ence. You can plant more in less space and if you har­vest reg­u­larly, they just keep com­ing. The pick­ling ones haven’t really taken off yet but I’m hop­ing to get at least two bunches out of it before it gets too much hot­ter. The toma­toes have been slow to ripen though the plants are loaded with fruit. I planted too many plants too close together so I think I’m fight­ing against heat and dis­ease to at least har­vest some before some­thing goes ter­ri­bly wrong. The yel­low pear tomato plant is going insane and must have 100 toma­toes on it, only one bunch of which has ripened yet.

We’re going to have a good crop of corn assum­ing I can keep it bug free for the next 3 weeks or so. Also, the egg­plant is start­ing to fruit and the cul­ti­var we planted is a Japan­ese vari­ety with strik­ing fruit.

I upgraded my water­ing sys­tem last week­end. The soaker hoses weren’t doing what I wanted them to do. Because the soil is very loose loam, water tended to go straight down from the soaker hoses, hit the clay under­neath and run out the bot­tom of the bed. Also, I couldn’t get enough pres­sure built up to run the last two or three hoses and those were crit­i­cal since that’s the cucum­bers, toma­toes and pep­pers. So, as the pic­tures below show, I upgraded in sev­eral places to micro sprin­klers run off of 1/4 inch lines that run off 1/2 inch main lines tied directly to the PVC mains. They are fan­tas­tic. I can put two micro sprin­klers between rows and have both rows suf­fi­ciently watered in 20 min­utes. I removed the fil­ter from my timer and that increased the pres­sure enough to run all the sprin­klers plus the remain­ing 4 or 5 soaker hoses.

I also ran a long hose to my squash with a sin­gle sprin­kler. That was much more effi­cient than run­ning a soaker hose out of the bed since most of the water wouldn’t ever hit the squash. All the sup­plies are DIG brand from Home Depot and since they have the attach­ments to run them off of PVC and ris­ers, I didn’t have to mod­ify any of the main lines. It’s made a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in the cucum­bers for sure. The pic­tures below don’t show it but there are two sprin­klers between the two rows of cucumbers.

The black­ber­ries are almost ripe though I have the feel­ing we will lose most of them to birds unless we pick them at 6 AM. I’ll prob­a­bly start plant­ing toma­toes and pep­pers next week­end for a fall gar­den. I have room for about 2 rows of pep­pers and 4 tomato plants. That should be enough for eat­ing, can­ning and mak­ing of yummy sauce.

West view with trel­lised cucumbers

black eyed peas front, toma­toes in the back

First egg­plant

Sprin­klers for the black eyed peas

Sprin­klers between the pep­per rows