Gwinnett County Master Gardener Program

I just got the call that I have been accepted into the Master Gardener program for next year. I was a little worried since they only accept a small number of people every year. This will be a great opportunity to volunteer in the community. I'm sure Jesse will appreciate that I'll have a place to go play in the dirt other than our house...

It looks pumpkin and tastes like a squash - Pumpkin Rumbo Hybrid

I'm always looking for something new and different when I'm ordering seeds. This year I came across Pumpkin Rumbo Hybrid. It looks a pumpkin but inside it's a sweet tasting squash. From 3 plants we ended up with 5 pumpkins and about 100ft of vine. This thing went all over the place. It grows roots as it goes so even though it's still growing all of the vine that is actually inside the garden has died. The real problem we have each pumpkin's size. Each one is about 15-20 pounds. For two people they're huge. So far we have cooked one and it made about 2 gallons of great soup. They seem to be keeping really well so as winter soup season gets here they should be perfect.

Giant Pumpkin sort of...

Normal pumpkins are so pedestrian. This year I ordered giant pumpkin seeds. Ideally it was supposed to get to 150 pounds. I would put mine at about 65 pounds. That was still much bigger than average. It was definitely worth $2 for the seed and I still have a few for next year. I think that my garden's less that ideal hours of sun really held it back but maybe with some more fertilizer I can at least get to a hundred pounds...

Scarecrow Motion-Activated Sprinkler

So last year I put up an electric fence around our garden to keep out the deer and raccoons. It sounded like a good idea and it seemed to work well enough for my parents in IL. Well after raccoons eat all of our corn I knew we needed something different. I'm not going to build a 10 foot tall electrified monstrosity of a fence like Joe Lamp'l on DIY.

So I when I saw this motion sprinkler I new I had to give it a try. At $60 it's a little pricey but I'll tell you that after using it this year it's definitely worth it.

I only had one problem and I'm not really blaming it on the sprinkler. I have brass quick connects on all of my hoses and they didn't play well with the sprinkler. I guess it was more that I was disconnecting the hose from the sprinkler daily to water and this was trapping air in the sprinklers valve causing only a little water to come out when it switched on. The solution was to run my hand in front of sensor switching it on before I connected the hose so that the water could run through the valve.

Now that I know this will keep the animals out the engineer in me is ready to take it to the next level. Our garden is about 60x30ft so one sprinkler doesn't cover it. Once I get the permanent fence in and I plumb for irrigation I'm going to setup about 6 sprinkler heads and a couple motion sensors that will switch on all the sprinklers. That should keep the deer out...

May Garden Update

The second year for our garden is off to a good start. We didn't get our big project of regrading the whole area and installing the permanent fence but we are trying a few new planting methods. Since we started about 90% of our plant indoors from seed we have staggered our platings to extend our harvest. After having a couple hundred tomatoes ripen in the space of a few weeks last year we are hoping to just have a steady supply for most of the summer. Even though we added about 300 sq-ft to the garden this year we are going to try growing our smaller spaghetti squash on a trellis since they went all over last year.

February Garden Update

I spent a few hours today working on prepping our garden for spring planting. We just bought a new 7hp Craftsman tiller from sears and it worked great. I tilled in a layer of leaves and broke ground on an area that we are adding on bringing our garden to about 60 ft x 30 ft. Compared to the typical Georgia red clay we have great dark soil and we are continuing to add compost making it even better. Our seeds that we started inside a few weeks ago are going great. The four varieties of tomatoes we started are really getting big. We also have peppers, brocolli, other seedlings that will be ready to go in the ground in a few weeks.

November Garden Update

The garden is plugging away. We had a freshly harvested salad with Thanksgiving dinner. Broccoli heads are starting to form. Everything is holding up well to the around freezing temps that we have been having at night with the exception of the eggplant which wasn't really expected to survive. We took avantage of the 3o% off sale at Park Seed and stocked up for next season. We will probably be starting some of our transplants indoors around the first of the year to get a jump on next year.

October Garden Update

Pretty limited amount growing right now. Jesse and I put in some transplants from home depot. She apparently wasn't reading the tags so we ended up with two sets of broccoli instead of broccoli and cauliflower. We also planted an eggplant, some lettuce, Brussels sprouts. They have held up well to the couple nights it has been close to freezing. We probably have Jesse's gnomes to thank for that...