Before and After Flower Bed

These are the before and after pics of the flower bed.

1st Pepper Harvest

These Hungarian Yellow Wax peppers were picked Aug 15th, 2009. They are the biggest wax peppers I have ever grown.

These peppers were picked Aug 8th, 2009. The peppers on the left are mini sweet peppers and Jalapenos on the right. This was the first pepper harvest of the year.

New Hydroponics system complete!

OK, so I completed my new hydroponics system today. It is currently only half full. The system is using the drip method. Gets watered for 30 minutes then off for 1 hour when the sun is out. It also gets watered twice throughout the night. This is completely experimental and my method will change as I learn. I am not using hydroponics nutrients at this point since we do not have anywhere around here that I can buy it. I built this in 1 day and did not want to wait for the nutrients to come in the mail. So, I am using miracle grow and epsom salt as the nutrients. I do not know if this will work or not, but I will keep you posted. I am leaving for Tennessee tomorrow and this will be unattended for the next 7 days, so hopefully they are still alive when I get back. More will be posted then.

Tomato Garden

So I moved my tomatoes this year. We don't use our clothes line anymore, so I figured this to be a good spot for my tomatoes. I like this section because it will allow me to walk around and harvest tomatoes, which will make it easier. Again, this year, I have my trusty fence cages for my tomatoes. I need to make some more, but have been busy. I have planted 6 Big Boy, 6 Roma, and 4 Early Girl vareities. I should have plenty of tomatoes for making salsa, and everything else I would want a tomato for. These plants were also started in the greenhouse.

Backyard Chicken

This is our backyard chicken. We have family in Tennessee, so when we are down there, we pick us up a baby chicken. We bring them home, raise them until our next trip to Tennessee. Then we take the grown chicken and swap it for a new baby one. It is nice to be able to raise them. The main reason for taking them back down to Tennessee is in case we get a rooster. We live in town and our neighbors would hang us if we had a rooster.

My Completed Greenhouse

OK, so this is the greenhouse I was talking about building in an earlier post. I could not have asked for it to turn out better. It has served me so well this season. It is a 12x12 and was fairly cheap to build. I had started about 1000 pepper plants, some flowers, tomatoes, pumpkin, cantaloupe, etc also. If you have any questions about building your own, please feel free to message me or email me.

My Pepper Garden

Ok, so again, it has been a long time since I have posted. I say that I will try better at posting, but it seems like I always forget. Anyways, as you can see, my pepper garden is looking very nice. In the first pic I have 9 rows of peppers. They are Jalapeno, Cayenne, NuMex Chile, Super Chile, Banana, Big Dipper, Mini Sweet, Habanero, and Naga Jolokia. They were all started from see in my new greenhouse that I built from PVC pipe. The second and third pics are of the beds I had to build for my peppers. I did not want to till up my entire back yard so I built these. Between the 2 planters, there is 23 different peppers planted in them. I still have at least 2-3 more to build in order to plant the rest of what I want to.

Building a greenhouse

Ok, so I kind of lost focus on my blog. I have not posted here in almost a year. Last years crop of 80+ varieties with 1500+ plants did not survive. My job forced me to work in a different part of the country for almost the entire summer. Unfortunately, most of my plants were not put in the ground and ultimately died. This year will not be the same. I am building a 12'x12' greenhouse of of PVC pipe this year. I have a plan that I found on the web at http://www.pvcplans.com/ArchGrnHouse.pdf

Seed Starting

I am getting the spring fever so I decided to go ahead and start some of my pepper seeds, since some of them take so long to germinate. To help the process around, I do not start my seeds directly into soil. Below I will show the process I use to start my seeds.

First of all you need a few things:
Paper Towel
Zip-Lock Bags

Marker

Water

First of all, get 1 sheet of paper towel. Fold it in half and dampen it with water. Not sopping wet, but moist. Place seeds as seen in the pic. You can use more/less depending on how many plants you are going to start. I do not mix seeds on the paper towel. I plant all the same seed in each setup.

Next, fold over the paper towel.

Second, Roll up the paper towel.

Thirdly, place the rolled up paper towel in a zip-lock bag and use the marker to label the contents of the bag.

Lastly, place your baggie on top of your hot water heater, or some other warm place. It a couple of weeks, you will have 2-3" roots starting.

My garden layout

Ok, so this is the layout I am going with this year. I was so impressed by the square foot gardening method, that I am converting my whole garden to SFG this year. I will be buying a 5 tier shelving unit for my seed starting which will be taking place real soon. I will post pics as I take them.