The previous garden construction posts took from September 2011 until January 2012 to complete. With the irrigation, raised beds and pergola complete, the only thing remaining was to fill the beds with dirt. I found a place nearby that advertised their “soil food web” raised bed soil made up of 85% compost and 15% coarse […]
Garden Construction: Dirt Read More »
Muscadines, like grapes, are vines that like to climb on things and really should be given a way to keep off the ground. I did plenty of research into the traditional methods of trellising muscadines, but really didn’t want to setup a wire system. Since the wires are in pretty high tension, and made higher
Garden Construction: Pergola! Read More »
The process of building the raised beds was quite long. Unfortunately, I tend to remember only after I’m done that I should have taken pictures. If you’re interested in the process, you’ll have to struggle through my writing. Once again, the process of building the raised beds started with the garden layout drawing. I used
Garden Construction: Bed Building Read More »
After the month-long frustrating adventure that was irrigation, I moved on to bed construction. That’s when I figured out that nothing would be easy or would go as planned, and I had planned thoroughly. I went round and round with bedding boarder materials. Landscaping bricks, red bricks, cinder blocks, cedar boards, pin boards, treated or
Garden Construction: Bed Timbers Read More »
There were a lot of things that went wrong in the garden construction process. That was really surprising and frustrating considering how much planning I did before I even started. I started the process of planning during the summer and created this drawing of our house and yard: This drawing evolved over time as I
Garden Construction: Planning Read More »
It’s been half a year since the last time I posted anything. Since then I’ve made a lot of progress on the garden in my backyard. I’ll go back through some of the steps I took. I started by working on the irrigation system. With the terrible drought we had last summer, there was no
Garden Construction: Irrigation Read More »
I really enjoy eating fruit. After years of not eating very many, it’s been nice to start purchasing more fruit during our grocery runs. Eating fruit and trying to pick the good ones reminds me of my dad’s garden growing up in California. We grew peaches, plums and oranges in abundance. As part of my
I just ordered the majority of the vegetable seeds for my garden. The seed packets individually don’t cost that much ($1.50-$4 a packet), but it adds up when you order 45 packets at a time. There are still a few seeds left to buy. I had some trouble finding the varieties I wanted. I used
Seeds, and Lots of Them Read More »
I’ve come across the perfect book for gardening in Houston. Year Round Vegetables, Fruits and Flowers for Metro Houston by Bob Randall, Ph.D, was written, as the title says, for Houston. Some of the gardening instructions are even specific to the area of Houston based on the average temperatures of the different areas. The city
Year Round Gardening in Houston Read More »
It appears that I’ve caught the gardening bug. It all started this past winter. We had a significant hard freeze here and lost a lot of our plants. That gave us a lot of open space to fill. I decided if we’re growing things, we might as well get something from what we are growing.
Gardening Phase One Read More »