After finishing the plumbing on the Mustang Chicken Coupe only to find out that the whole setup is not really cut out for the standard water pressure of our taps. The water drinker cups are of a low pressure type, really only geared for use with gravity feed setups like what might be used with a bucket reservoir. This means I had to look for water drinker cups geared for a regular water line pressure. Well I have those on order. With that I had to move on to something else, the garden in this case.
I had a few different things to address with the garden. First thing was the new raised bed project that we decided to take on. This one involves using regular buckets as planters for singular plants. In this case we have eight pepper and tomato plants. We dug out eight old cat litter buckets to use as planters. The plan is to build a base that is waist high to hold the eight buckets in the same way as the half drums to allow for easy work with the plants. We mixed up topsoil and composted manure like with the other planters to make a good medium for the plants. The plants needed to be put in the soil even before the whole raised bed was built, might as well give em a head start. Next thing on the menu was the setting up of the outdoor timer and power strip for the two hydroponic gardens that we have set up. The power strip was already in use for the two pumps but I needed a timer to turn these things on automatically. I had some old timers I had to test to verify their efficacy, one of them being a bona fide outdoor timer with two time settings. The timer is a full mechanical unit, not digital. The settings are nothing more than tabs that are moved to the times desired and when the mechanical clock rotates the dial with the tabs to the set time, the tabs will rotate a switch to turn the unit on and send power to the pumps. When the off tab is reached it'll rotate the switch again, turning the unit off. Pretty simple and effective. Well all I had to do for this was put a couple of screws into the sides of the posts for the four tier HPG so I can hang both the timer and the power strip. With that I set the times I wanted, once in the late morning and once in the early evening. With that, the hydroponic gardens (well at least these two), are automated. With this little job done, I moved on to the clean up of an area on the opposite side of the garden, a spot where I plan on moving the dog kennel greenhouse project. The current spot that the kennel is at has the garden at the size its always been but my plan was to downsize the dimensions of the garden by at least 10 feet. I wanted to widen the gap of the area at the back of the yard, where the dog yard extends into. Since we're using more raised beds and more hydroponic gardens, we won't need so much real estate. We can't do anything with the well established fruit trees that have been in the ground for 5+ years but there are some fruit trees that have been planted in probably the last couple of years. Same goes for some berry bushes. The same class of trees and bushes we uprooted and transferred to drums in a previous installment where I cleared an old raised bed site are the same class of trees that are present elsewhere in the garden, including in the area that would allow my moving the kennel to be in line with the new fence line I plan on setting up. I had two fruit trees to move within the area in question. One peach and one fig tree, both still kind of small so they haven't established deep roots yet. I dug out another drum and cut it in half to make two planters. Next I worked the trees until I was able to pull them up from the ground. Once free of the ground I cleared any errant weeds from the root base then planted each tree in another mixture of topsoil, composted manure and some chicken mulch. In the area where the old raised bed was, where I already set up three drum planters, I still had space for a 4th planter so one of the new drum planters went here, the one with the peach tree. I set aside the fig tree as I'm still not 100% sure where this one will go. I just wanted to get it up from its old home and in a planter so it can get itself established in the drum. With the planters done I moved on to further cleaning up the area where the trees came from. This involved moving the old tire that was used as a crude raised bed planter as well as getting the push mower involved when it came to cutting all of the high weeds and grass within the area in question. With a little work I managed to cut the grass within the area I plan on setting up the kennel, as well as the surrounding areas at the back of the garden leading back to the raised beds and further in to where the old growth fruit trees are. I really just wanted to get a lot of the high grass cut within the areas that I plan on operating in during my garden revamp. With the grass cut the last thing I did was spread a bunch of mulch that I had several bags of along with the dirt. There were areas where old mulch washed away or because of past rains there were areas where mulch was piled up. I spread the old mulch around along with the new mulch so I could cover the bare areas, including the area around the four drums. With the trees set up in their planters and the mulch spread out I can move on to building the frame for the bucket planters. As with the other wood projects I had to gather some scrap wood to spit up so it can be ready for separating and cut down for the base. There will definitely be more to come.
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