BYC gardening thread!!

[SunnySkies]

Follow your logic.  As I don't irrigate, I wouldn't have even thought about damaging the system.  I once tried to dig through a buried electrical cable with my spade.

Um. Yes. I will admit to doing the same. But hey, I learned from it

With any luck, we won't need the system, like last year, except for a dry few weeks in the height of summer.

I was hoping to get to lay it all out next week and just lift it up to lay the cardboard under, but the several days of 40-50 degree weather that was predicted have seemed to become two, and now one. Sigh. But at least that bitter cold has gone away. That was awful.

 

[lazy gardener]

BTW, Sunny Skies, I do believe that you are torturing me here. Today, I actually saw a bit of bare ground in my garden. I was digging around in the snow around my cold frame, trying to dislodge the huge slabs of ice on top of the snow over my cold frame... trying to see if the weight of the snow and ice had cracked the glass on top... when my foot fell through the crust, and I lost the ice cleat off my boot. Not to mention filling my boot with ice and snow, and sinking in up to my knee. I then had to get down on hands and knees and dig the cleat out of the snow. so, I glimpsed just a tiny, very tiny bit of bare ground. Might I add, very cold, very frozen bare ground!!!

 

[marktoo]

Depends on the situation. You don't want to damage your lines of course but if you place your lines on top of the cardboard, the water would first run off, eventually saturate the cardboard & then the ground. That's the way I figure it anyway. Here the cardboard pretty much dries out between watering during the heat of summer. I usually only use the cardboard on my larger veggies. I plant tomatoes then place the cardboard on either side of the row of plants then mulch. Summer squash, peppers & eggplant I cut the holes in the cardboard before placing it in the beds & plant through then mulch. Sweet potatoes, I make a hill, place & stake my lines to the sides of the hill, place the cardboard on the sides of the hill then mulch. I direct seed very little. Everything else, I just mulch pretty much.
Your garden is about 10x the size of mine if I remember correctly so my methods may not work out for you, time wise. I would be interested in knowing how things work out with the hose on top of the cardboard if that's what you do.

 

[marktoo]

Follow your logic. As I don't irrigate, I wouldn't have even thought about damaging the system. I once tried to dig through a buried electrical cable with my spade.

Must be nice, not having to irrigate. Cut a low voltage wire once thinking it was a tree root. I was cutting a bunch of feeder roots out of my way so I could repair a leak in some pvc pipe, the wire was in with them. Oops!

 

[lazy gardener]

It's not that I don't have to irrigate. I have a very deep well with a very low water return, so using a lot of water in the garden is not an option for me. Deep mulch has been a total garden saver for me. I spot water only where needed, and thankfully don't have to do it much.

 

[SunnySkies]

BTW, Sunny Skies, I do believe that you are torturing me here.  Today, I actually saw a bit of bare ground in my garden.  I was digging around in the snow around my cold frame, trying to dislodge the huge slabs of ice on top of the snow over my cold frame... trying to see if the weight of the snow and ice had cracked the glass on top... when my foot fell through the crust, and I lost the ice cleat off my boot.  Not to mention filling my boot with ice and snow, and sinking in up to my knee.  I then had to get down on hands and knees and dig the cleat out of the snow.  so, I glimpsed just a tiny, very tiny bit of bare ground.  Might I add, very cold, very frozen bare ground!!!

LOL, I only see bare ground because of the piggies, clearing and digging (and escaping....UGH). Although our snow finally disappeared, just in time to get more this week.

I had a similar incident out there in the garden, only it was mud. The pig pen was a human's knee deep in mud, so I wanted to move it. I stepped over to where the fence was to pull it around and went right down to my knee. Efforts to pull my foot out only succeeded in removing my boot, which filled with water and mud. Hubby put a board down so I could stand on that with my bare foot then he went for a shovel to dig my boot out.

Mark, I have been thinking about that too. Lucky for me, I have a high flow well and could leave it on with a timer for the 6-8 weeks we seem to need it in the summer. Or I'll come up with another way to cover it. Or push the cardboard off it a bit. I dunno.

It's been raining (I'm so glad it's just rain) enough nothing got done outside.

Here is a dumb question ..... If you cardboard your garden, how do you fertilize? I could run it through the drip or use a spray I suppose instead of applying fertilizer and then tilling it in like my dad did and what I did to get the ball rolling here.

 

[marktoo]

Here is a dumb question ..... If you cardboard your garden, how do you fertilize? I could run it through the drip or use a spray I suppose instead of applying fertilizer and then tilling it in like my dad did and what I did to get the ball rolling here.

I use compost, manure tea or fish fertilizer but again small scale. They have liquid fertilizer injectors, that will allow you to fertilize through your irrigation system. Liquid fertilizer seems so pricey to me but it's concentrated so I dunno...maybe it's worth the cost.

 

[lazy gardener]

Personally, if I were cardboarding or papering my garden, I'd just put it in the paths. I'd do deep mulch over the growing beds and rows. (so that the whole garden is mulched, but the walking paths have the extra layer of cardboard or newspaper under the mulch.) Do you mostly grow in beds or rows?

 

[SunnySkies]

I do rows, like a regular farm, but the weeds are....problematic. And like a farm, I cannot be out there weeding all the time. It's cardboard or plastic, and cardboard seems a little more holistic, kwim. I'm moving to a no-till, but that means I need to kill what is out there so I don't have huge, huge numbers of weeds coming back up. I think this year could be really tough, with every year getting better.

I am also going to try to do more seedlings versus seeds to attempt to get a cover going sooner, although the time investment for some plants may be too much for a return, and some things just don't like to be disturbed and do better direct sown.

My preferred fertilizer last year was compost and fish emulsion...great stuff....but I didn't do a lot, knowing it was a first year garden. I did have a basic fertilizer applied and tilled in when we broke ground in April. In thinking about it, it also seems that as the cardboard and paper and straw and stuff breaks down, it would improve the soil, and I could apply compost directly to my rows and let it soak in, eventually achieving some decent soil. What we have is really kind of awful, a thick, slick, heavy clay. Pigs have also dug up a fine crop of rocks as they tilled and fertilized things

I mulched the walkways last year, but the rows were overrun. It looked like a jungle by the end of the season

 

[lazy gardener]

You can pull the mulch right up around the plants in the row. In my permanently mulched garden, I use my garden fork to pull the mulch back a bit, dig the tines in and do a bit of tine rocking the entire length of the row, then it's ready for seeds or transplants. If planting seeds, I leave the soil bare until the seeds have sprouted, then gradually increase the depth of the mulch around them, but it's at most about a 4" wide strip. If transplants, I snug the mulch right back around the plants. It takes way less time for the limited ground work with my garden fork than it would take if I used my tiller in the standard fashion. If I'm doing a garden bed, I still prefer the fork as it gives me some good exercise, and I only plant one bed or section at a time (usually).

The worst garden enemy as far as weeds are concerned is a nice fluffy bed of soil left bare, and perhaps not planted until "a little bit later". That gives the vigorous weed seeds a few days head start on the garden seeds that are soon to follow. If the garden does get tilled, one option is to plant it right away. The other option is to gently use a garden rake to stir the top 1/2" of soil every couple of days. That exposes the roots of any newly sprouted weed seeds so they can be killed without dredging up a whole crop of seeds from the lower layers of soil. I make it a point to always pull the rake through a bed right before I plant it.