Anyone else interested in home gardening?

[lotsa luck]

I started a small salsa garden late last year and while pretty successful I wasn't as happy with it as I wanted so this year it's going way beyond. Aside from plant holdovers from last year I jack hammered out 20 yards of nasty clay/caliche soil, dug short drywells and sloped the pit bottoms for drainage then brought in custom blended soil made here in Phoenix for vegetable growing.

Currently have a small custom hydroponics setup for starting plants and wow does this ever grow them fast. 6 variety's of tomato and 14 of peppers including Native variety's to Arizona and close by states.

Since its still technically illegal to have a garden in the front yard here in Phx, mine is considered an art project with laser cut mountain borders and custom lighting. All the mountains are from pictures I took while prospecting around the state.

Luckily for me my grandson likes to help.

[nvchris]

In making one of these, and we have indoor window boxes where we grow greens and herbs 367 days a year.

http://www.gardentowerproject.com

[El Dorado]

Great topic, our small raised bed garden pooped out about 85 lbs of tomatoes this year along with many kinds of peppers, squash, even a few strawberries and watermelons. A few herbs to boot.

Great idea making it into an art project, thinking out of the box for sure

[lotsa luck]

I like the tower idea a lot but I would also make it rotate by hand or very slowly powered so all side get equal sun in order to be most effective.

[klunker]

With all the "food fraud" these days we have been producing as much of our own as we can including beef, pork and poultry. So maybe I can pick up some good ideas from you folks here. Lotsaluck I get the feeling that there is a move afoot to make personal food production difficult.

[FlakMagnet]

We have had all sorts of gardens.

The most fun are raised beds, you make them pretty much anywhere.

If you use good soil, water well and don't have too many varmints,

you can grow all kinds of great food.

Raised beds are a fairly easy do-it-yourself project and are actually fun to make.

Interesting thread and I like making it an art project.

[Bedrock Bob]

I had a couple of raised beds up north. The gophers were so bad and the soil so acid from the juniper trees it was a bunch of work. You had to keep a hail screen up too. But the cherry tomatoes were the best and way more than I could eat.

Down here in Las Cruces melons, cantaloupe and squash will almost grow wild. And the soil is perfect sandy loam that is perfect for growing almost anything. I will try some melons and some big pumpkins this year.

I have cactus. Lots of them. Not really a home garden but a growingg project. I've had them for 8 years now. Started with five in one pot. Had over 200 at one point. I'm down to about 75 now. Some are eight feet tall.

[homefire]

Seen a thing about growing food with only water mist on the net. Can't find any today on it. They had Racks standing up and just misters on the root ball and stuff. It produced Nice Tomatoes, Onions and a pile of lettuce and other goodies. It was developed to produce food in space with minimum water and recycle what humans had used. The lattice they used looked like the Plastic Canvases my wife uses for Needle Point stuff.

[lotsa luck]

Here are some of my current cherry tomatoes outside. Had over 100 getting ripe but listened to the news weather dude and didn't cover them one night when I should have. Lost 4 plants dang it. The other is my small hydro setup I made for testing various ways. Currently doing flood and drain 3 times daily, the sprouts are all just over 1 week old, the far right tomato was purchased and then stripped of soil and put into the system to test its growth.

[homefire]

We have these things that look like a Green water melon All over the place here . There Tasteless just wet Pulpy goo. Then you have the Coyote Gourd with the most Nasty Bitter Taste you could ever imagine.

[Red_desert]

I'm so tired of gardening because of being with my aging parents both in their 80s now. We can go all year without eating out once, just because of the gardens and fruit trees.

Besides the huge main 2 gardens, my parents found a way to put mini-gardens in the yard. If you have some 2 x 12" boards you don't need, nail them together to form a box. You can buy bags of peat or other type of rich black soil. Where I live you can take your pick up truck places to buy a load.

First time building a box was for a gape vine, It lasted quite a long time, but parts of it are weathering away. Just use yellow pine and it will last longer. I guess if the box does rot you could put rocks around the old boards and let them compost.

Edited December 22, 2013 by Red_desert

[Nugget Shooter]

Yup we garden....

[klunker]

Do any of you gardeners have a PROVEN cure for gofers. I have tried everything from old wives-tales to high teck inventions and nothing has worked. The Gofers here weigh about 4 to 6 pounds can chew through a cast iron sewer pipe and often knock my house out of plum with their tunnels.

[FlakMagnet]

dynamite

[Au Seeker]

dynamite

Sorta my thoughts as well, but this is a little safer, I think you can rent one rather than having to buy.

http://www.rodenator.com/

or another version/make of the same line of thought.

http://www.rodentblaster.com/

Maybe a little cheaper if you can DYI a homemade version of either of the above units.

[edheinrich]

Regular use of fish fertilzer works great. Good for the plants, good for the soil. Once it builds up in the soil the gophers will not dig.

Blasting them out of the ground looks like way more fun.

Ed

[El Dorado]

Klunker

[garimpo]

Do any of you gardeners have a PROVEN cure for gofers. I have tried everything from old wives-tales to high teck inventions and nothing has worked. The Gofers here weigh about 4 to 6 pounds can chew through a cast iron sewer pipe and often knock my house out of plum with their tunnels.

klunker you don't have gofers, you have Viet Cong!!! My little Bro. retired after 28 years in the Army. He was a tunnel rat in Nam....he hates tunnels.

[Jim Gilmore]

use dry ice.

[Red_desert]

Our gofers are small, it is the moles here that tunnel into everything. Generally rodents including mice don't like the smell of human hair. That works a little if you can cut your own hair and sprinkle around your plants, it puts protein in the soil also as a type of mulch.

For moles, traps and nothing seems to work except this:

My mother read it somewhere in gardening tips, pee in an empty plastic milk jug. I guess you could save it up, but we always took out ASAP to pour down a mole tunnel entrance. I think that worked better than anything else so far.

[frank c]

I've been growing sweet peppers indoors and they are delicious

[Hoser John]

To rid a garden of gophers and moles simply dig into fresh mounds and place 2-3 mothballs there and adios they go. Helps to keep dogs/cats/rodents out also. I buy them at the lousy $1 store. We have a huge garden at my buds Bob house,over 60 years in the same dirt as with proper mulch,crop rotation and feedings after all these years it's righteous veggies for me. Spring,summer and fall crop rotations and tilling all stalks back into the dirt works mighty fine as cucumbers,corn,2 kinds a squash,cantalopes,beets,radishes,3 kinds a tomatoes and on on and on. GOOD stuff and organic as no pesticides ever either-John .

[weaver hillbille]

GArdened for forty years.

CAliche soils benefit from sulfur( over time) to acidify and help to break it down.

I hope you don't overwater as caliche can act as a bowl-drowning roots.

Were you able to penetrate all the way through?

http://ag.arizona.edu/pubs/garden/az1281.pdf

[FlakMagnet]

the gophers who inhabit our gardens

eat mothballs for breakfast...

frightening.

[Bedrock Bob]

Gophers are worthless. But moles aren't too bad. If you get enough of them you can make moleasses. Very nutritious!

I've tried it with gophers and the stuff is just bitter.

Edited December 24, 2013 by Bedrock Bob