UberlootsGardening with a Gaming Perspective

Attack thy Neighbors!

Now, I have been gardening since I was a little kid and you would think by now I might know what I was doing, however, I have found that gardening is an ever learning sort of experience. No matter how much you learn it seems to me there is that much more to learn out there. All you can do is share what you do learn and keep reading and experimenting and learning from others. Why go to all this trouble? Because as you learn, your yields tend to improve, your costs tend to go down, the taste of your harvest tends to improve, and the effort expended tends to lessen. In my experience that is how it works at any rate.

I tell you this because I, being a rookie to the Texas garden, didn’t bother to read the plant specs carefully on a plant I decided to grow and these pictures show you the result. This plant is called Luffa Cylindrical, it is where those wonderfully fantastic luffa sponges come from. I read that it was a natural for my new environment and that it was highly ornamental and would grow vertically. What I failed to notice was the actual height this beautiful plant can get to, 30ft! So, as you can see it is taking over my house.

Climb Luffa Climb!

I would still recommend this plant to anyone even though I have not harvested any sponges as of yet because it has required almost no care, the bugs that have eaten everything else haven’t seemed to bother the Luffa, and because the leaves are very ornamental, they are bigger than my head even. Just be ready for the size of this. It was planted by seen on May 7th, and now, August 8th, just 3 months later it is taking over the world. I keep forcibly pulling it from the neighbor’s side of the fence every couple of days and I keep trying to find places to poke the searching shoots back into the jumble to keep it contained. I am especially surprised this plant has done so well since I had no room for it in my garden bed and had to plop it right on top of the sod I covered with some newspaper and a couple inches of dirt and then mulched them. Also, believe it or not, this mass of growth you see in the pictures all came from only 2 tiny seeds.

I am sort of thick headed though so it is good that I am reminded now and then to look before leaping. Next year, I am not sure how but I will be prepared before I plant my luffa, even if that means investing in a good machete to protect the neighbors!

It is by no means a new idea to use toilet paper rolls to start seedlings in, but it is definitely an idea worth sharing. The toilet paper rolls are a byproduct of household life and if folded flat store quite neatly in a quart sized storage baggie pinned up inside the bathroom cabinet. Then when you are ready to plant your seedlings you get those toilet paper rolls out and follow the simple steps below. This first picture follows steps one through four, left to right.

Steps 1-4 starting at the left

1. Start with a empty toilet paper roll, having a few bits of toilet paper clinging to the roll won’t hurt it in the slightest, the only reason to remove those bits is if they annoy you.
2. Fold the toilet paper roll flat; just squash it with your hand onto the counter. Then center the newly made crease and fold it flat again. Doing this will make the roll into a square form.
3. Now open your roll up, it should be nice and square at this point. At the bottom of one side cut a half inch slit at each corner. Then fold those slits outward and crease them.
4. Now starting with whichever flap you chose fold each flap in going clockwise, when you get to the last flap tuck the end under the first flap. Just like when you close up a cardboard box.
5. Now, I find it is easier to put them all into a tray packed tightly and fill them with dirt all at once. Now that they are filled with dirt and ready to go just plant your seeds in and water like normal.
6. When it is time to transfer to a bigger pot or outside into the ground your pot can be planted with the plant. I would just advise opening the bottom up with a gentle tug an inch or so above the plants new resting place so roots can get through even easier. (Though some roots may have already grown through the sides of the pot by now) Also make sure that the top of the cardboard is completely covered with dirt. Just to make sure the cardboard cannot wick away any moisture.

Filled and ready to go

The cardboard will finish degrading in the soil. Well done on recycling! Every little bit done by each of us to reuse and recycle helps. Don’t let anyone tell you one person’s contribution or lack thereof makes no difference because it does make a difference. I also wanted to note that the idea to cut the bottoms and make flaps to fold in for a solid base came from a member: Joeysplanting of Myfolia. These can be made without this step and shoving them together tightly into a tray certainly helps with this but I have made mine with the bottoms ever since I saw the idea and I just love it so my thanks go out to them.

Another tip, to keep track of what is planted in each pot use non-toxic markers to mark right on the rolls what you planted in them. I also like to add the date to keep track of also.

Hard to believe it is May already, it just sort of snuck up on me. We gardeners have a busy month ahead of us depending on our personal flavor of Gardening.

Now is a great time to trim back spring flowering bushes. The Houston area has some wonderful resources for learning how to prune things. It can be a little tricky to get a hand on but once you get the hang of it, it takes only a few minutes for most plants.

Also now is the time to fertilize any trees you have not fertilized as of yet. I know I have mentioned it before but I highly recommend using MicroLife fertilizer. It is an organic fertilizer available locally from many locations. Feel free to send me an e-mail with your general area and I will let you know of a nearby supplier if I know of one.

1Up Basil

The various planting charts I have been researching for my vegetables suggest planting: asparagus bean, basil, buckwheat, chives, collards, cucumber, eggplant, Malabar spinach, peppers, luffa squash, okra, peanuts, pumpkin, rosemary, sesame, southern peas (like limas), squash, sunflower, sweet potato slips, cantaloupe, and watermelon.

That is a lot of food to get into the ground. For many of the above listed the first half of May is the best time of all to plant them. I am planning on starting a lot of the above from seed in the next couple of days. I know now more than ever a lot of us are trying to learn more about gardening. Especially not knowing what the future may hold for the economy. Victory gardens are becoming more and more popular. CNN even mentioned the victory garden as more Americans are starting gardens, for the first time in many cases.

I actually see this as a good sign, as we grow more of our own food we will be saving ourselves money. I have put a lot more money into this than I really needed to. Some of it because of not knowing better and some of it for convenience sake, like the irrigation system, which will in time pay for itself. Watering without it is certainly easy enough, just finding the time or if you plan on being gone for an extended time you need to make sure you have a back-up plan of some sort, a neighbor or an irrigation system, or pay a gardener to water your plants because a vacation could be devastating to your plants without planning their care into your trip. I still travel back to Missouri a lot and so my irrigation system means I do not have to worry about being gone.

With time moving so fast it is easy also to get behind. Projects we plan to do can keep getting put off, sometimes indefinitely. Now is a good time to start writing your plans and thoughts down. Even an online journal like this can help you remember events that happened in your garden. It doesn’t have to be pretty, or even full sentences. Simply the plant type, date planted, location planted, and productivity or healthiness of the plant. Then next year you will know which ones should become annuals and which ones not to try again without changing at least one of the variables.

The soaker hose irrigation I decided to install in my garden is giving me some problems. Even though we have tried two different pressure regulators it seems the pressure is still too high. We have large streams of water spurting from the hose going off in whatever direction they feel like, often landing on the yard and not putting the water where I need it, in my garden. As a result some plants are not getting any water at all.

I went ahead and paid out extra for the nicer brass water pressure regulator. We just could not get it to work right, but that was during tax season and we were trying to set up the system in the dark holding flashlights to see so we grabbed the cheaper, non-adjustable plastic version and threw it on. The important thing was that we start getting some water to the plants since we were unable to take the time to water them. Now, in these last two weeks we have received more than enough rain so I have been putting off the task of fixing the irrigation system. After doing some research online though it looks like an underground irrigation system would have been a better idea.

I have to point out though that the underground irrigation system I have been looking at may require a lot more talent than I have to install. It seems though that the extra set-up time and cost would be worth it in the long run. An underground system loses almost no water to evaporation, where as the soaker hose will lose a fair amount of moisture to evaporation on hot, sunny, or windy days. Before making any final judgments though I think I am going to try the underground irrigation system on the next couple of garden beds and compare with the results from the first couple planting beds which currently have the soaker hose system. This is all assuming I can get them both set-up and working properly. Once I have some results I will post a follow up to this. Also any suggestions on better irrigation would be more than welcome.