Regardless of what we have going on around here, one thing that I always have to make sure to have set up is the garden. Now last year I had been setting up hydroponic gardens and various raised bed garden concepts that for all intents were a success with the plants that were grown in them. This year with all the car stuff going on its a tad difficult to just jump head first into the garden but not impossible.
I will have to do some maintenance work, really just cleaning up, on the hydroponic systems before planting something in them and the raised beds are going to need some fresh compost and fertilizer along with a little more fresh dirt. One of the older raised beds that I made from a drum half fell apart at the legs so its pretty much trash because the legs broke at the welds going into the drum skin, its rusted away, no need to try and patch more metal onto something that's just going to rust even more as time progresses. It'll just be better to scrap that and make room for a newer better raised bed setup. One of the plants that I did get planted first was potatoes. Potatoes are funny in that they kind of like cooler weather and will in fact thrive very well when the temps hover around the 70's during the day and the 50's at night. Once the plants grow very large, they'll become more heat tolerant but not resistant. As the summer temps climb into the 90's the plants will eventually start to taper off and get to the tail end of their lives, while hopefully having grown plenty of spuds underground before the plants die off. I planted a few spud plants in the old fridge raised bed, in one of the newer half drum beds and in the shop fan shell raised bed. Another thing that I planted in the shop fan shell raised bed was some salad greens. Several lettuce plants were planted among the spud eyes, and among the already growing greens that I forgot what they were but they were still growing strong through the winter and now into the spring. This raised bed will be a mixture of salad greens and herbs and potato plants. I also threw some potato plants in one of the washer drums in the same area as the shop fan bed. These plants have this drum bed all to themselves but with the expectation that during the summer when they do die off I'll do like I did last year, I'll pull the spuds and their dead plants up and replace them with seeds for lettuce and other salad greens so I can have a fall crop. I might throw some other form of cool weather/fall plantings in there like carrots or what not, but the point is, after harvesting one type of plant during the height of the grow season, you replant with something that will reach its peak at the extreme end of the grow season, before the frost sets in. This of course isn't the end all to the planting. Even with the automotive work that's going on, I will be getting my one main hydroponic system back online and planting some pepper plants within it like I did last year, along with more tomato plants in the other bucket beds. I will be trying to get my other hydroponic systems completed and operational so I can get salad greens growing within those while at the same time trying to get some more raised beds put together for more tomato plants and perhaps some greens. It's going to be too late to get other plants like squash and cucumbers in the ground as they should've been in the ground a month ago so they could get a good head start but the weather went kind of stupid which could've jeopardized the young plantings had I put them in the ground at that time. Either way, whatever I don't get in the ground this year will be replaced by multiples of other plants that are more tolerant of late plantings.
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