Gardening by Mistake

I’m trying for the first time a method I’d read about some time ago. With this method, you take a 2-liter bottle or a milk jug or whatever container you want, and you put a small hole in the bottom of it. Place it where you want to water and fill it with water. The water will slowly drip from the container. It will drip so slowly, in fact, that it has time to be fully absorbed into the soil, rather than running off it or being evaporated by the sun. This will provide a slow, deep watering for the spot you place it.

I started collecting rainwater this year. I’m too cheap to pay for an expensive rain barrel, and in my situation I couldn’t use the spiffy hose on one, anyway. So I have a large, and I do mean large, tub sitting under a spout. I probably collected 35 gallons in that. When I’m on top of it, I bail some of that into a second container that holds something like 17 gallons. In a good rain, I collect some significant water which I’ve been using to brew my AVCTs (chloramine free!) and to water plants. I need to use up today what I collected last Sunday because I have seen the very first mosquito larvae. As soon as I see them, I use up whatever water remains in the bin. It takes something like a week for the mosquito larvae to complete its cycle and become a mosquito, so by doing this I make sure I’m not raising mosquitoes.

I’ve got my first 6 gallon milk jugs out in the garden, dripping as I type. I learned something, though: only put one hole in the container. A smaller hole leads to a slower drip and a longer watering time. If you put two holes, even small holes, you’ve just lost your nice, slow drip. I’ve got one jug that way and that is how I discovered this. It will still do a good job watering, but it won’t be quite a good as the others. (Also, don’t let your husband use a pocketknife to make the holes because he think the slit will work just fine. It won’t! Use a small drill bit or an ice pick or something like this.) It will be interesting to see how long it takes for those gallon jugs to drip empty. Only some of my roses will get watered this way. I don’t have enough water for them all. Hopefully we’ll get rain soon and I’ll be able to re-charge my water bins and then another bed of roses will get a slow, deep watering between rains which don’t come often enough  this time of year when it’s blast-furnace hot.

Incidentally, you can use this same setup (a jug with a single small hole in it) to attract birds. Hang the dripping jug over a container that can collect the water. The sound of water will attract the birds. If you use a shallow container, the birds will likely bathe in it.

I was determined to get to the garden and spray some AVCT yesterday evening. I couldn’t believe it when clouds started to fill the sky and a check on the radar showed big storms headed our way. There wasn’t supposed to be much chance of rain. Ha! No waiting for evening, then, to do my spraying.

I grabbed my sprayer (made more difficult by the fact that my son had moved it and I didn’t know it– I thought I was losing my mind when I couldn’t find it) and got it loaded up. I debated about straining the tea before putting it into the sprayer. Last time, I used a coffee filter, but that took a long time. This time, I used a wire mesh strainer. I didn’t think the strainer had very large holes, but apparently I was wrong and that wasn’t fine enough.

Yes, I saved time loading the sprayer, but I more than lost that time in the garden as I had to repeatedly take off the sprayer head and clean it out. Once I even had to clean out the tubing that sucks the water into the sprayer. I got to know this new sprayer real quickly. So call this a learning experience. Next time, I’ll take the time to strain better than what the mesh strainer does. (I need something that’s a compromise between coffee filters and the strainer. A coffee filter filters out fungi, which I want in the tea).

At least I got it sprayed in time for it to dry before the storms once again sent flood waters through my yard.

One nice thing about being out there, a bonus for my work: I got to see my first oenothera missouriensis (Missouri primrose) bloom from a WS baby. It was wonderful— huge and a very bright yellow (a pure yellow; not an orangey yellow). I wish I’d grown more now. I’ll be sure to do so when I WS next time.

I think the last of the rain we got in our recent deluge was Sunday morning. Before it had all started Saturday morning, I’d put a cover over one tub of plants I didn’t want to drown. I left it covered. In fact, I forgot it was covered until about 30 minutes ago. It was a beautiful, mostly sunny morning. Rain was supposed to be out of our forecast except for about a 20% chance of rain.

I guess we’re that 20%. In the blink of an eye, clouds covered the sky and rain started pouring down. And it continued to pour for about 20 minutes now. A heavy downpour. My plants had been uncovered for about 10 minutes. They are now floating. (I didn’t notice the clouds until the rain began pouring. I wasn’t interested in getting drenched, so the plants remained uncovered.)

I keep going back to one of the WS lessons I wrote about previously: next year, I’m using drain holes in my containers. Being able to bottom water by pouring some water into those tubs is nice. But the rest of the time it’s a real nuisance. Next year, I’m going to lose a lot fewer plants because of this.

The rains and the flooding continues. I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out to the garden and get more work done. If the forecasts are right, after today the rain will end. Of course, my garden will continue to be quite soggy for days after that.

Update: It looks like in the past 7 days we’ve had almost 10 inches of rain. Our average annual precipitation here is about 37 inches.

The rain we had this morning was incredible. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it rain that hard for so long. The berm behind our yard was not up to the task, so we had a torrent of water rushing through the immediate backyard (good thing the dogs were inside!) and my rose garden was under so much water in places you couldn’t see the cinder blocks of the raised beds. All that water was moving fast as my garden is on a slope.

The drainage channel at the street which leads to a creek was insufficient for the volume of water, so it backed up into our entire front yard and then it actually covered the road several inches deep. The pictures don’t do it justice, but here they are anyway. On the picture of the street, everything on the street to the right of the tree is under water. The other picture shows part of our backyard.

And we’re still supposed to get more heavy rains this weekend. Not good.

It’s going to be a while before I can mow!

It’s been a busy week in the garden and I haven’t been inside much to be posting to the blog. I applied another AVCT soil drench and I’ve gotten a lot of weeding done and after the 4 inches of rain in a little over a day, I began putting down a thick newspaper topped by leaves mulch to trap that moisture in (and stop the weeds, of course). It’s raining again now (we’re supposed to get another several inches this weekend– we’re sure going to wish we had this come late July!) and again, once it stops, I’ll be out early next week taking care of another bed. Of the 4 beds in the rose garden, I will only mulch 3 (if I have enough leaves to get that far). The other still floods with a current when it rains much. Until I get that fixed any and all mulch washes away.

In the meantime, I’m scouring the web for information on AVCTs and CTs.

I may have lost an entire tub of echinacea ‘Prairie Splendor’ seedlings. That’s 40 plants. And that’s not the end of my likely losses, either. So what happened?

Quite simply: the tarp didn’t work. And, worse, I thought it had, so I didn’t check on the plants. It looked like more rain yesterday, so I didn’t want to pull the tarp back and then have to fight with it to cover the plants again. Now, of course, I wish I had. The plants floated in water 24 hours longer than they should have.  Some plants have taken it remarkably well (at least so far) but others, like the echinacea, are looking pretty horrible.

I spent a couple hours Monday emptying the tubs and literally squeezing water from each pot before putting them back in their tubs. I was trying to figure out some way to wick some of the water out of the pots while I did this. I had an idea and I’m just trying it out. If it works, I’ll post it. One good thing is that it was windy Monday. That should help a bit toward drying out the soil.

There’s another lesson in this: have drain holes. I purposefully did not have drain holes in my tubs (obviously each pot has them) because I thought I could bottom water that way. I wasn’t thinking ahead at that time to the spring rains that come inches at a time. Doh! I’m trying to decide now whether I want to add holes at this point. I’m leaning toward no, aware of the fact that I’ll have to do better with covering them the next time it rains.

I’m mad at and very upset with myself about this. Some of the plants out there I started in November (New Jersey Tea and some native grasses) and grew over the winter under lights. The bulk of them are from winter sowing which I started at the beginning of January. Months and hours of work and care, floating. It’s not just that time and effort that upsets me, but also the fact that I lose an entire year for anything that doesn’t get planted this year. In the case of some of the bushes and slower growing perennials, that’s important.

I’ve already had doubts about my ability to ever turn these garden beds into something I can be proud of. The ongoing flooding in the garden and this just magnifies my doubts and feelings of being overwhelmed.

Anyone remember that musical and that song? It’s actually before my time, but I remember hearing the song once when I think my parents watched the movie on TV. Anyway, it popped into my head yesterday evening when the remnants of Dolly rolled into our area. We’d been having a really dry time, so the rain was welcome. However, Dolly may have over-stayed her visit. We’re having flooding problems due to so much rain. Some of my pot ghetto plants were in a tub, where I could move them easily and water en mass, etc. This is probably 6 inches deep. When I looked out this morning, the plants were floating in the tub. It was full to within an inch of the top. The tub isn’t under the roof or any place where water would be pouring into it. We just got a lot of rain!

Unfortunately, we’ve had what I think is going to be a tree fatality, as well. I was startled to look out my back window today and see my apple tree lying on its side. It just seems to have slowly tipped over under the weight of the apples and rain. I’m going to try to right the tree (using the lawn tractor to pull it, I imagine), but I don’t know how well that will work since I assume the roots are messed up now. I’m fairly upset about this. We planted that tree almost 8 1/2 years ago when we moved in. It had achieved some nice size and was producing great crops of apples each year. I’m just sick that I might lose that.