Vacation Watering

My garden is off to a slower, less enthusiastic start this year. I decided not to plant so much as I plan to be away from home a bit more this summer. I just don't have the time to properly take care of my plants. And this past week was the first of my summer challenges: keeping my plants watered for a week with no one at home. In the past I've had someone take care of things for me but this time I decided to find a way to do it without asking for help. I figured that if my plants are still relatively young and planted in self watering containers they might be able to survive that long without needing a watering.

But for the plants not in self watering containers I needed to find an automatic solution. I purchased a Claber Oasis self watering system. It's nothing more than a tub with a timer controlling the opening and closing of a small value. When open, water can flow from the tub through flexible tubing to drippers over the soil in your containers. Only problem is, relying on gravity, it needs to be higher then your plants. And some of my plants are in a planter box at table height.

I added a shelf to the side of my highest planter and placed the Claber there. I pushed all of the containers towards the back of the balcony where they get less sun, clustered around the Claber. And I fed the water lines in a loop over the containers, with a few drippers per container. I even placed drippers over my self watering containers. Then I covered the tops of all the containers with white plastic to prevent the soil from drying out too quickly.  The timer on the drip system was set to go off twice a day and deliver 4oz per dripper per watering session.

When I came home after a week, I was happy to see everything still alive and growing. Only problem I had was with the drippers higher up, closer to the tub. To work properly, the drippers have to be a couple of feet below the water reservoir. The drippers didn't drip as much. Some of them I had modified to drip faster and these did all right. But some providing water to a couple of pepper plants could have been working better.

Hardening Off

Happy Mothers Day!

Not a very big selection this year: four black cherry tomato plants, three California wonder peppers and two Hungarian hot wax peppers. Not sure if I'll plant all of them. I also have some golden midget and sugarbaby watermelons inside along with a dozen basil and celery plants.

I've been putting these out to harden off for the past few days now. Weather has been nice but the winds have been blowing strong making it hard to keep the little plants out there for too long. I think I'll be planting these soon - no later than the end of the week. Have to get the balcony cleaned up too. And I need to buy more potting soil, fertilizer and compost. It's going to be a busy week.

Lighting

I wanted to get some extra lighting over some of my seedlings so I picked up this 22" HO fluorescent growlight at Lee Valley. I was going to construct some kind of stand for it from some scraps of wood but I didn't really feel like putting even that kind of commitment into it (yeah, I'm lazy). My kids have this K'NEX toy set that they rarely use so I quickly put together this little frame to temporarily hold the light above one of my starter trays.

I have another tray and I could use more light but this is good enough. And this was a week ago. The plants in the other tray; tomatoes and pepeprs, have been potted up to individual 3 inch pots now.

Like every season, I'm running behind in my planting. I did good with the tomatoes but the peppers could have been seeded earlier. And the celery is way off. Far too late, but I'll try anyways. Basil is on schedule. And I keep forgetting to start the melons. Maybe tomorrow...

Tomatoes are up

The black cherry tomatoes came up yesterday. Pretty much all of them I believe. Those things didn't waste any time and I seem to recall having no trouble starting them last year. But everything else is still down, like all the old pepper seed that I planted. I have low expectations for those. I was going to go out and seed a box with some greens and radishes but it's just too windy today. Sunny, but howling windy. Maybe tomorrow.

Time to get planting

Time to start thinking about the balcony again. We had that run of unusually warm weather last month that made me think summer was almost here. But temperatures have settled back to April norms.

I just seeded a seed tray with Utah Celery and from what I've been reading it's a little late but so what. I also started some Black Cherry Tomatoes which I had much success with last year, some Casper Eggplant which I've never had much luck with, Hungarian Hot Wax Peppers which have grown well in the past and some old California Wonder Pepper seeds that I will be surprised to see germinate. The tomatoes will be planted out for sure but I'm not sure yet which of the peppers or eggplant will, if any.

I want to start a bunch of Basil plants too but I'm going to hold off on those for a while. And I'm planning to start some watermelons also: Golden Midget and maybe... maybe Sugar Baby. I plan to grow the midgets for sure. Not sure about the sugars yet. I've got some time before those need to be started.