Although it feels too hot to think about a fall garden, it’s time to plant tomato and pepper seedlings, winter squash, and corn.

Click any photo to start the slide show.

You can compare these photos to the May photos and June photos.

Click to enlarge.

My youngest holding a small seedling: All seeds contain a tiny plant embryo along with enough stored energy to (ideally) enable it to grow through the soil and create its own energy as a seedling. The process of a seed becoming a seedling is called germination.

Making Seeds Last

Fluctuating temperatures and humidity shorten a seed’s potential shelf-life. To ensure that seeds remain viable for as long as possible, keep them in a consistently cool, dry place.

Some gardeners go to the effort of drying their seeds to less than 8% moisture to ensure long-term storage (near ten years in cases). I take a more laid back approach and keep mine in an cracker jar in the fridge with a bit of silica gel to absorb moisture.

The container should be as airtight as possible. I tested this jar with water to make sure the lid sealed tight.

An old sock inside the jar holds the silica gel. When everything is tucked in and closed up, the jar goes in the fridge to keep it consistently cool.

I purchased the silica gel from a local craft store (look in the floral aisle) for about $6. This type of silica gel has blue indicator crystals that turn pink when it’s time to change them out. You can reuse the crystals by baking them in the oven to release the moisture – the procedure is on the packaging.

Seed Longevity:

Even under good conditions, seeds don’t maintain a high germination rate indefinitely. Here’s a rough guide on how long your seeds will last before losing vigor:

• Short Lived (one to two years):
  Corn, Lettuce, Onions
• Medium Lived (three to four years):
  Beans, Broccoli, Carrots, Peas, Spinach
• Long Lived (four to five years):
  Cucumber, Radish, Pumpkin, Squash, Tomato, Watermelon

In a small garden, it’s not worth the risk of weak plants from planting seeds that have lost vigor. Unless it’s from a hard to find variety, I would discard seed that might be too old.

Sharing Seeds:

If you have more seeds than you expect to use before they die on the shelf, consider sharing them. I purchased far too many sweet corn seeds this season and will be sending them to The Dinner Garden, a San Antonio based non-profit group that distributes free seeds to gardeners, church groups, and food pantries who need them.

More Information

• Colorado State University Extension: Storing Vegetable and Flower Seeds
• Victory Horticultural Library – The Vegetable Garden, by MM. Vilmorin-Andrieux, 1885 – An extensive chart of expected seed shelf-life.

Click any photo to start the slide show.

You can compare these photos to the photos from May.

Daily temperatures are predicted to be near 100° (38° C) next week. It will be interesting to see which tomato varieties hold up through the high heat.

To help ensure there is enough water to go around, our water conservation district is limiting ground water users to 3,000 gallons per person each month along with other restrictions such as watering plants by hand only. To help lower our water usage, I’ve started experimenting in the garden with ollas.

Ollas (pronounced oh-yahs) are one of the oldest and most water efficient irrigation techniques available. Ollas are unglazed ceramic water pitchers buried near the root zones of plants. Instead of watering the plant directly, you fill the olla. The water slowly seeps through the clay walls of the olla as the roots take it in. Unlike traditional irrigation techniques, very little water is lost to evaporation and runoff.

As a small experiment, I planted two beds this spring with identical vegetables – one with ollas and a control bed without. As ollas are hard to find locally and are a bit pricey with shipping, I made my own out of terra cotta pots and silicone.

Making Ollas

Olla-making supplies: Unglazed terra cotta pot (2 per olla), tile, silicone.

To seal the bottom hole, I used a peice of broken tile glued in place with silicone.

Two pots are then glued together for each olla leaving the top hole open for filling.

Ollas vs. Hand Watering

Both beds in the experiment consist of three different tomato varieties with bush beans in between. Both beds were dug and prepped the same way and I’ve added organic fertilizer to both identically.

When I first planted the tomatoes, I hand-watered all of them during the first week to get them established. Depending on rain, I now fill the ollas and hand-water the rest of the tomatoes about every ten days. I’ve never watered the bush beans.

Olla buried in the garden. The shell covers the top hole to help prevent evaporation – you can also use a flat rock.

The ollas take less time to fill (and therefore less water) than it does to water the rest of the tomato plants. I don’t see any real difference in the health or size of the plants – in fact, the tomatoes on the non-olla row are a bit taller. Both seem to be producing about the same amount of fruit.

Fortunately, we’ve had a decent amount of rain in the last month and I haven’t had to water much. I think the real test will come during the longer dry spells that we typically see in July and August. Despite the recent rain, the drought is expected to continue.

More Information on Ollas

• Pakissan.com: Pitcher Irrigation: A Water Saving Technique
• Santa Fe Master Gardener Association: Olla Gardening
• University of Pretoria Study: Clay Pot Sub-Surface Irrigation as Water-Saving Technology for Small-Farmer Irrigation (PDF)
• Little Homestead in the City: Ollas

Where to Buy Ollas in the U.S.

• East Central Ministries
• Peddlers Wagon

While browsing the gardening aisles of the local hardware stores for a replacement, I was disappointed that my options ranged from another cheaply made $10 aluminum wand to a cheaply made $30 plastic wand.

Not wanting to drop more money on something that wouldn’t last, I headed over to the plumbing aisle to see if I could make my own.

Building the Frankenwand:

With a few leftover parts from the broken wand, a little garage scrounging, and a couple of $3 plumbing adapters, I managed to put together a wand that should outlive me.

Parts List: (shown left to right)

• spray head – 3/4″
• 3/4″ female screw-on adapter
• 3/4″ male screw-on adapter
• coupler
• 45 degree bend
• valve
• 3/4″ copper pipe
• rubber grip

Note: Standard garden hoses and attachments have a 3/4″ thread.

The copper pipe is cut into two pieces. About 36 inches for the main handle and about 3 inches for the end. You can adjust for what’s comfortable – I made mine a little longer than standard wands so I don’t have to stoop down as much.

The valve sits between the wand and the hose and allows you control the flow right from the handle. I used the valve and spray head from the old wand, but both are available separately at nurseries and hardware stores. I also used the rubber grip from the old wand, but you could substitute a rubber bike handle if you can’t find a grip. The grip helps if the wand gets hot from sitting out in the sun.

Assembling the parts on the hose end.

Sweating the pipe on the watering end. These copper fittings must be sweated to make a watertight seal. If you don’t have the tools for sweating copper pipe, you could substitute the copper pipe for PVC and the appropriate glue.

The finished frankenwand in action.

If you want to buy a wand, and avoid the cheap options from the local hardware store, check out this DRAMM professional model. I’ve noticed it in use at all of the local nurseries and it comes with a lifetime guarantee.

The pumpkin vine is growing about a foot each night (I’ve had to aim it outside the fence to keep it from overtaking the rest of the garden) and the tomatoes are starting to reach out of the cages.

The summer melon, Spinach Malabar, and cucumbers, however, aren’t growing as enthusiastically as the rest of the veggies.

Click any photo to start the slide show.

One of my two watermelon plants wasn’t doing well and most of its leaves were tightly curled. I didn’t know the cause, but my aphid-experienced wife knew to inspect the underside of the leaves. Sure enough, the leaves were swarming with the little buggers.

Aphids on the underside of the leaves.

Ant Gardening Fact: Did you know that some species of ants raise aphids like humans raise cattle? They place the aphids on the leaves, protect them, and then “milk” them for food. No kidding – you can check it out on Wikipedia.

After a bit of googling the problem, I blasted most of the aphids off with a hose and sprayed all the leaves with diluted dish washing soap. I noticed that there was a small ant hill near the base of the watermelon but didn’t know at the time that they might be aphid wranglers. Both the aphids and the ants seem to have moved to greener pastures after I sprayed the soap, but I don’t know if my watermelon is going to make a recovery. The leaves are still a bit curled and whole plant seems fairly stunted compared to the other watermelon.

The watermelon stunted by aphids.

The other watermelon plant only a few feet away had only one or two aphids and is growing quite well. Now that I know what I’m looking for, I frequently check for aphids on the underside of my plants.

The unaffected watermelon.

The tell tale footprint and the missing top to the corn.

Total damage included four stalks of corn and three sunflowers. A few other sunflowers have leaves missing, but I don’t think it will set them back too badly.

I’ve heard that dogs can be good at keeping deer out of the yard. Our dog, unfortunately, doesn’t consider deer in his yard problematic enough to interrupt his sleep.

At least for now, I’ve draped deer netting over the corn and sunflowers to protect them.

The dizzying array of systems and techniques for creating a vegetable bed include traditional farm rows, wide raised beds (without boxes), raised beds (with boxes) and container gardening.

Then there’s the rototilling, single digging, double digging, or no dig (lasagna) methods of loosening your soil.

After that, there are at least a dozen charts on plant spacing ranging from the intensive Square Foot gardening approach recommending four square-feet per tomato to a more extensive approach recommending sixteen square feet per tomato.

Choosing Sides

Me? I’m an extensive, wide, raised bed (no boxes), organic gardener with two garden boxes on the side who likes a skinny double cappuccino dry at the “coffee” shop.

My gardening strategy for beating the Texas heat is to space my plants fairly well apart – they will have better air flow between them and room for a much larger root structure than they would with a more intensive approach (in theory, anyway).

Tomatoes spaced four feet apart in four-foot wide beds.

I’m going with four-foot wide beds, a two-foot wide path running the length of the garden, and one-foot wide paths between each bed (you can see the garden map here.) I’ve decided not to build boxes around my beds to save on money and make it easier to use hand-tools. I find it a bit harder to use a full sized shovel and hoe in our smaller raised beds without banging into the wooden sides.

Four feet wide is a comfortable space for me to lean across to weed and the slightly raised beds help remind little feet to stay on the paths (stepping on the beds compacts the soil which inhibits root growth).

Quality Time with my Dirt: Hand Digging the Beds

At the expense of folks questioning my sanity, I will admit that I poo-pooed the traditional rototilling method and hand dug my eight beds. My goal was to try to get at least a foot deep and to remove most of the larger stones from my rocky soil. I will say that hand-digging beds is a great workout and is best done with a sharp shovel and some good tunes on your iPod. My city-girl sister pays good money for workouts like this called “Boot Camp”.

The first garden bed dug one foot deep and raked smooth.

There’s a great explanation in Gardening When it Counts on how to hand-dig beds over time without killing yourself. Rather than digging an entire foot down on each pass, you attack it in two or three passes.

To hand dig a bed, you slice it into rows of about 4-5 inches each. Place a wheelbarrow at one end of the bed, dig out a row of soil about 4 inches deep and put the first row in the wheelbarrow. On the next row you turn the soil into the hole you just left in the last row – making sure any grasses are upside down so that they don’t easily grow back. Repeat this until the last row and dump the soil from the wheelbarrow into the final hole.

The next time you dig the bed, the top four inches will be nice and loose and you’ll be able to turn over eight inches or so. Keep repeating until you get to your desired depth.

Feeding the Dirt

To enrich the soil I used a combination of finished compost that I purchased from Natural Gardener just outside of Austin and handmade organic fertilizer. The compost can be purchased by the bag or by the yard (one yard is roughly one large pickup load). I spread 1-2 inches on each bed. For easy measuring, two five gallon buckets of compost will add half an inch to a 50 square-foot bed.

The fertilizer recipe is from Steve Solomon and is available both in his book and in this article at Mother Earth News. Basically it’s a combination of seed meal, lime, gypsum, rock phosphate and kelp meal.

Mixing the fertilizer. Central Texas soil has a lot of limestone and a high P.H. so I went very light on the limes. The original recipe also calls for bone meal – slaughterhouse leftovers dried in a powder. We’re vegetarians, so I skipped that ingredient and increased the amount of seed meal to compensate (as per the recipe instructions).

I shopped around at a number of feed stores in the area to find the ingredients. One owner told me that seed meal was a “Yankee thing” and that you couldn’t get it in Texas (I didn’t tell him I was a transplanted Yankee). I eventually found all but the kelp meal at Callahans General Store. I found the Kelp at Natural Gardener.

The fertilizer ingredients all come in 20 to 50 pound bags and you’ll want somewhere dry to store them – I use a large plastic garbage can in the garage.

I spent about $60 on the 1.5 yards of compost and another $200 or so on the fertilizer ingredients which should last a year.

Caged pepper plant with fertilizer spread around the root zone (side-dressing). Grow pepper, grow!

A great gardener plants his tomato neither too early nor too late, perfectly nestling the fruits of his labor between the winter frost and the summer heat. A great gardener does not walk by his ready-to-pick broccoli too many times before it flowers. A great gardener knows his windows of opportunity, growing better tasting produce with the least amount of work.

I, however, am a new gardener full of gardening screw-ups.

While I missed my window of broccoli ripeness, I did not miss the opportunity to give my wife flowers.

Having no interest in gardening at that point in my life, I begrudgingly started building the raised beds. We used the old cedar deck boards I had recently removed from the deck to create two 4′ x 4′ boxes and built them into the backyard hillside where our youngest plays (we call this the “kid zone.”)

One of two 4′ x 4′ garden boxes I built from old cedar decking.

The soil we have in our back yard is pretty poor, so we decided to shop around for something better to fill the boxes with.

What I didn’t know then is that good garden soil should look like chocolate cake with lots of organic material and a nice earthy smell. What I also didn’t know is that the (free) soil a few hundred feet down the hill from our house in a wooded flood plain would have worked great to fill those beds.

I thought that I had to use official “garden soil”. After calling around a bit, we discovered that the trash dump (yes…the trash dump) 10 miles from our home sold “garden soil.” I had recently purchased a trailer from craiglist, and to save money, we decided hook up the trailer and haul the soil ourselves.

Early one Saturday morning, my wife and I loaded my then two year-old up into our SUV and headed to the dump. After I paid the woman at the small entrance booth for the soil, she directed me down some back roads behind the public area of the dump to where the garden soil was. We drove where we were told while dodging massive dump trucks that looked like they could crush our SUV without feeling the bump (I brought my child along, why?).

R.I.P. Melon – This little guy didn’t make it in our new “garden soil”.

Eventually, we found the piles of soil and a friendly front-loader driver to fill up the trailer. Unfortunately, I think we loaded the trailer from the wrong pile. What we loaded was a fairly lifeless, light-brown fill dirt. It was not the stuff that great gardens are made of – but we were blissfully unaware. We were also unaware that the huge load of soil was far too heavy for our SUV and would cost over $500 in brake repairs the next week.

Planting the garden beds.

Despite our lack of gardening know-how, and our load of dirt that ultimately cost us $600, our first garden was lots of fun. The mint and other herbs did great, and the scrawny big-box tomato plants managed to eke out enough cherry tomatoes for our youngest to munch on as she played in the yard. We considered it a success.

And it got me thinking. What could I grow if I really took gardening seriously?

“Do you know how much effort it will take a deer to jump over this fence?” Dad asked as he helped me stretch and staple the new wire fencing from post to post.

“None at all?” I replied.

“Less than that.”

A super-high deer proof fence is not going to work in our side yard (see previous mention of Wife Acceptance Factor). Despite this I feel a need to protect the garden with a small fence to keep out the family dog, the teenager’s friends who for some reason think it’s OK to turn their cars around in the yard, and the 3yo and her battery operated pint-sized jeep.

And besides, a fence says “Behold! A serious gardener lives here!”

The Posts:

I decided not to use chemically treated lumber around the garden and needed to build the fence on the cheap, so my wife and I decided on a typical Texas-styled cedar post fence.

I had planned on purchasing my posts from a local tree trimmer that sells posts in front of his business but had a very strange encounter with the owner. The encounter went something like this:

• Pull up to pile of posts.
• Read sign that says “Posts – $1. Pay first”
• Put $20 in pay box.
• Load posts.
• Have angry cedar post man pull up in truck to yell at me about stealing his posts.
• Unload posts.
• Request refund for $20.
• Leave as rapidly as possible.

OK…Plan B. Cedar posts are readily available around Austin via Craigslist and I could have had the posts I needed delivered the next week for about $150. I was annoyed that I wasn’t making progress on the fence, however, and decided to go “post shopping” in my own back yard. The wooded area in our back yard has about 15 cedars and it was relatively easy to find enough straight limbs that we wouldn’t miss.

After a full afternoon of cutting and hauling scratchy cedar limbs in drizzling rain, the Craigslist offer looked pretty darn good.

The Post Holes:

In preparation for installing the fence I ordered a Fiskars Post Hole Digger. This thing ROCKS, and while it doesn’t take the hard work out of hand-digging post holes, the quality and design is far beyond that of 30-year-old knuckle-busting post-hold digger I had in my garage.

I dug the holes about two feet deep and filled around the post with dirt (no concrete).

The Final Fence:

The fencing I used around the garden is four-foot wire mesh and comes in large rolls. You basically stretch it as tight as you can and staple it to the posts.

Fence progress on Sunday evening. I’ve since cut the posts to 6″ above the wire.

Now to find a way to keep the deer out…

I’m digging up an existing sprinkler box that has a hose bib in it and tying in new PVC pipe that will run about 40 feet underground towards the garden. I’ll be putting the new hose bib below ground so I don’t have to worry about wrapping it during the mild freezes we get here.

You can see where I meandered a bit in the beginning before my engineer wife came out and suggested I run a line to make it a bit more straight. Engineers are funny about straight lines – even underground.

I’m digging this by hand, so the pipe will be about 15 inches below ground (1 foot is the minimum required by code, 2 feet deep is probably smarter).

The hard part is digging the trench. Gluing it all together is a snap – although the three year old kept absconding with my cut pipe pieces because they make a good run for her marbles.

The first eight garden beds with compost on top, ready to be turned in.

The space my wife and I have marked out for the new garden is 40 feet long by 28 feet wide – 1120 square feet! (That’s 104 square meters for metric thinkers). I’ll start this spring with eight 4′ x 12′ foot beds with room for twice that much growing space as I expand.

The garden is located in our side yard, where it receives full sun all day except for the late-afternoon partial shade from a nearby pecan tree.

Since it’s visible from the street, the garden will need to have a fairly high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) – in this case, I’ve pre-negotiated that a rustic, neatly maintained vegetable garden is fine. A weed-infested field of neglect with tools and supplies left out for all to see, however, will ensure complaints from my better half.

My family and I are tomato junkies (my wife once spent over $36.00 for six pounds of heirlooms that were devoured in 48 hours) so about half of this summer’s garden will be dedicated tomato space. The rest of the garden will be home to pumpkins, sunflowers, corn, watermelon, cucumbers, and any salad greens we can get to grow in the summer heat.

My goals for the new garden include:

• Use organic methods.
• Save money on organic produce.
• Learn to start my own seeds.
• Make my own compost within the first few seasons.
• Explore and use low-water gardening techniques (Central Texas is in a severe drought right now with mandatory watering restrictions).
• When possible, use hand tools rather than gas-guzzlers.
• When possible, use local inputs rather than plastic-wrapped inputs from across the country.

The two main gardening books I’m using for reference are The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible by Edward C. Smith and Gardening when it Counts by Steve Solomon. Neither authors are local to my zone, but both produce a large amount of their own food. That seems to be a mostly forgotten skill in these times.

This photo is from May 2007, a good year for Texas wildflowers. (No worries, wildflower nuts, my wife is one of you and additional yard space will be dedicated to wildflowers.)

I suppose the recession, global climate change, salmonella scares, and the dangers of pesticides have all contributed to my desire to garden. Mostly, I feel driven to slow down and live a little more purposefully – hoping my 3 year-old and even my 17 year-old daughters will discover something about living well along the way. I guess this is my modern day freedom garden.

Despite having very little experience in actually growing my own food, I’m going big on this garden. I’ve spent the winter scouring seed catalogs, gardening how-to books, blogs, and TV shows and I’ve just dirtied up my shiny new shovel digging the first few beds – mostly in the wrong place because I rushed to see how well the shovel worked before taking time to measure.

February 2009. The new garden boundaries marked with string.

I look forward to sharing my adventures in gardening. If you would like to follow along, you can subscribe to the RSS Feed..