Houston Lawn & Garden

Welcome back folks.  It’s that time of the year again (actually it is a few weeks past that time of the year) to get the Houston vegetable gardens going again.  Regardless of your personal feelings about global warming you’ll have to admit that we had an unusually DRY summer and early fall followed by a colder than usual winter.  All these things put together equals some extra work that we have to do to prepare for our spring vegetable garden.

02/27/10 - After the last freeze

Here is how the garden bed looked on the last weekend of February after the last freeze.  The growth that started taking over in the center is not the St. Augustine runners as you would expect.  Instead they are patches of CLOVERS.  This is a clear indication that it is time to fertilize the lawn because clover is one of the few plants which can produce nitrogen from the atmosphere.  Other plants can not do this and require nitrogen fertilizer to be added.   So the natural conclusion is that the soil has had most of its nitrogen depleted over the winter.  Besides for fertilizing, we’ve decided to expand the bed to 10′ x 10′ which gives us some extra room we’ll need for when the tomato and pepper plants mature.

Adding new Top Soil

So here is the plan for this season…we are expanding the bed, adding about 1/2 ton of new top soil to till into the existing soil and build up the bed.  Then we’re going to border it in to help retain water and limit external growth from creeping into the bed (and to make my life easier when it come to mowing and weed eating).  What we’re dealing with here are 40lb bags of generic bulk top soil.  There is no sense in going with anything expensive since our goal is to  ‘bulk up’ the base.  After we get the base tilled in with the new top soil, then we can take a look at the situation to see if we need a thin layer of premium top soil (or even potting soil) on the top.

Pulling up roots with the tiller

The first step was to empty all of the top soil into the bed and spread it out over the expanded area.  Next, I head over to the hardware store to get a 4-hr rental on a light-duty tiller.  The rates are very reasonable and I just can’t justify buying one outright for using it once a year (not to mention the storage headache), so this it the perfect solution for my application.  The main purpose of the tiller is to mix the new top soil in with the existing base.  The residual benefit it that it does a heck of a job in pulling up roots.  If I would have tried to pull roots without the tiller, I guarantee that it would have taken me the entire weekend!  As it is, we got the whole job done and the tiller returned with 1.5 hours left on the contract.

Garden Bed Soil Prepared

Here is what the newly expanded garden bed looks like after putting in 1/2 ton of new top soil and a few of hours of sweat.  As you can see, the sun is starting to go down for the day.  There’s just one last thing we need to do before hitting the showers.  We need to rummage through the lumber pile in the garage to see what we have to work with to create a border around the garden bed.  I think I recall some hanging in the rafters that might be perfect for this application.  I just hope that I have enough to work with and that it’s in good enough shape.  We could go with the brick borders, or even some of the plastic stuff that I’ve seen at the garden stores, but our motto is ‘why spend money if you don’t need to’, especially in this economy.

Getting the Lumber Painted

Sweet!  We have the lumber and after measuring it out, it looks like it will work perfectly.  Just a few cuts here and there to even out the sides and we should have a winner.  But first, let’s slap on a coat of exterior latex (that I just happen to have laying around) to prevent the boards from rotting and to keep it from looking like a ghetto garden.  We’ll get one end of the boards painted and let them dry over night, then flip them over tomorrow and paint the other end.  With that said, I’m done with the garden preparation for the weekend and my lumber will be ready for me to assemble anytime during the week.  All I should need is a couple of hours to get it knocked out.  That’s all for now.  Come back soon and see how it turned out.