Potatoes New Home

Cindy has been working very hard recently to complete the new raised bed out behind the fence, and now she has moved the potato grow bags into it.

New Raised Bed

Since the new bed is out behind the fence, it's even more important to protect the plants from the varmints in the area.  We saw a very healthy looking rabbit under the bird feeder on this side of the fence the other day, so we know they're not very far away.

Potatoes Are Blooming!

The potato plants were looking a bit wilted after their move, but Cindy hooked up the irrigation system yesterday, and today they seem to be reviving from their move.

I'm always in favor of more potatoes.

Covered-Up Cover Crop

Cindy decided to put a cover crop of beans, vetch and three or four other seeds in both the old and one of the new raised beds this winter that can be tilled under and worked into the soil as "green manure" in the spring.

So we were sitting in the hot tub one morning last weekend and soon saw that the California Towhees thought we had provided them with a grand new buffet.  They would fly up, perch on the edge of the plexiglas panels that are supposed to keep the varmints out of the raised beds, then swoop down, peck up a few seeds, and fly off, only to repeat the process moments later.  They managed to gobble quite a bit of seed while we were watching.  Since they're ground feeders, I guess they just got tired of waiting for the House Finches and Goldfinches to drop seed out of the bird feeders.  I thought it could have been worse; it could have been the whole flock of Mourning Doves.

However, Cindy was not prepared to see her whole cover crop go down the gullets of a gang of marauding Towhees.  She covered the bigger bed with a permeable cloth that will allow sun and rain through and used good old-fashioned clothes pins to clip it to the plexiglass panels.

Original raised bed with plexiglass panels

She made a cover for the new bed by cutting up some PVC piping, installing it upright in the soil in the new bed and then tucking half hoops made of black irrigation piping into the PVC pipes.  

New raised bed with hoops

 Then she covered the hoops with the same cloth, creating a simple little greenhouse for her cover crop.

Covered up crop

This should thwart both the birds and the squirrels, we hope, until the cover crop can mature.  

Background

First, let me make it clear that Cindy is the gardener in this household. She became a Master Gardener through the University of California extension Master Gardener program two years ago and does the gardening work. I do most of the carpentry and occasional unskilled labor.

About ten years ago we built a raised bed garden in the back yard so that Cindy could grow vegetables in some decent soil. We built it from 2 x 6s stacked three high in a sort of curved "L" shape. We sank 4 x 4 posts in cement to bolster the sides of the bed. In retrospect, that was probably overkill, but we were concerned about the weight of the soil pushing against the sides of the bed and possibly causing it to collapse. Fortunately, that has never happened.

We also put 2 x 6s along the top of the sides to make a seat all around the edge so we could sit on it, but we've never used it for that. Instead, it's probably helped with our critter exclusion.

Because we did have critters, right from the start. As our tomatoes grew, the ground squirrels were watching from the shrubbery. Cindy began a mostly losing battle with the varmints, but we did get a few tomatoes that year. Nothing better than a home grown tomato. Yummm. The battle with the squirrels got so bad that the next year Cindy decided to enclose the whole bed with plexiglass panels. That worked so well that we were able to have tomatoes without squirrel bites out of them, although we expected to see the squirrels bungee jumping into the bed from the nearby shrubbery to get those tomatoes.

As a result of all this work, we've had years of tomatoes, zuccini, squash and basil, and enjoyed them all. So this year we've built two more smaller raised beds. These two beds are rectangular and only twelve inches high and don't have the horizontal seat around the edges, but the first one has produced great tomatoes this season. That allowed Cindy to grow beets and green beans in the original bed.

The original raised bed is on the left in the picture above and the new ones are on the right. We got the flexible connectors we used for the corners of all the raised beds from Improvements at http://www.improvementscatalog.com , item # 142380 .

The black weed blocking fabric is there to kill off the bermuda grass and will eventually be covered with decomposed granite at some point.