Garden Update

I talked about my garden at the apartment previously, and it has grown literally and figuratively. I've got the table I constructed that has the main garden, a half barrel on the patio, flower wall box and a hanging basket. in addition to all of that, I have installed a rain barrel with irrigation system that goes to all growing areas.

On the garden table, I have grown green and yellow Zucchini plants, pansies, marigolds, a jalapeno pepper plant, and two bush green bean plants. In the half barrel I have a tomato plant with some marigolds. In the wall box I have petunias and marigolds, and in the hanging basket right now is some more petunias of a different type.

I've gotten varied reactions to the garden from the management and neighbors. Management has believe it or not been good with it. I also offered the ladies in the front office some tomatoes once they are in. The neighbors have varied from indifference to all out support. I again offered to share some of the produce with them, since I will probably have more than I can eat. It's been a good ice breaker with some of the neighbors as well, leading to some conversations with people I haven't talked to in a year of living here.So overall it's been positive on that front.

The irrigation system is my crowning achievement. The rain barrel fills from just an evening of rain. It's then connected to a pond pump through various fittings not particularly designed for that job, and then feeds up into 1/2" tubing to be distributed to the garden table and to the other side of the patio. It then gets further distributed to 1/4" tubing to little drip fittings. It only takes 5 minutes to give the entire place a nice gentle soaking, which is handled by a timer plugged in at the patio. Each morning it distributes the water and everything keeps growing.

I had two main objectives with this. The first was to keep me from having to use a bunch of little watering can trips to water the garden. I don't have an outside hose connection I can tap. Secondly I wanted to make sure the garden would be self sufficient to survive while I was at Infocomm in a couple weeks. I'll be gone for 8 days, and that would be enough time to have things die.

So that's where the garden stands at this point. I'll post more pics and another update in a few weeks when some of these budding plants start producing veggies.