Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post G22-034: Taxpayer-financed leaf disposal, a harmful relic of the past?

 

My town goes to great effort and expense to collect and dispose of leaves each fall.  Homeowners are instructed to rake their leaves to the curb.  The leaves are vacuumed up, trucked off, and hot-composted.

To me, this looks increasingly like an anachronism.  It’s one of those practices that was a point of civic pride 40 years ago, but which today appears to be a convenience that results in needless environmental harm.

We need a new paradigm that turns this maximum-effort approach on its head.  Instead of collecting as much leaf volume as possible, our goal should be to encourage town residents to do as little as possible. Citizens should be encouraged to:

  • leave their leaves alone, or
  • rake them into an unused bit of their yard (“sheet composting”), or
  • mulch them directly into their lawn.

Only as a last resort, rake them to the curb, to be trucked around by town staff and ultimately sterilized via hot composting.

The Town still has a necessary role in removing leaves from roadways and storm drains.  Getting them up off those impervious surfaces prevents rapid flow of leaf-borne nutrients into already-overburdened local waterways.  (And continued street sweeping is a legal requirement here, given that we relied on the existing street-sweeping program to comply with certain nutrient runoff reductions mandated by the Chesapeake Bay Act.)

Beyond that, the town needs to recast this annual leaf collection not as some great municipal benefit, but as a necessary evil of living in a tree-dense suburban landscape.  And as such, it should devote resources to minimizing the quantity of leaves input into this process.  I’m guessing that just a little bit of effort in this direction can both save money on leaf collection costs and generate some small improvement in the local environment.

Every suburbanite owns a power leaf mulcher

Let me start this section with one weird fact:  The mulching lawn mower was invented in 1990.  This, per Google Patents.  That 1990 patent document cites the the avoidance of significant monetary and environmental costs of yard waste disposal as a major advantage of a mulching mower.

Today, all mowers are mulching mowers.  Or nearly all.  My local Home Depot has 54 different power lawn mowers in stock.  I checked the first dozen listed, then spot-checked another half-dozen further down the list.  Every one was advertised as a mulching mower.  Gas, electric, multiple blade — it made no difference. To a close approximation, mulching is the default.  In the modern era, “lawn mower” is synonymous with mulching mower.  With effort, you might be able to find one that doesn’t mulch.  But you’d have to work at it.

There appears to be near-universal agreement that mulching your fall leaf litter in place is beneficial to your lawn.  By which I mean, mowing your leaf-covered lawn with a mulching mower.  Which, these days, per the above, means mowing your lawn.

Everyone from Fine Gardening to Virginia Tech Extension Service to Bob Villa says that this practice benefits your lawn.  When shredded by a mulching mower, leaf litter disappears quickly, with an upper limit of roughly half-a-foot cumulative leaf depth (per Kansas State).  The resulting mulched leaves provide a modest degree of fertilization (e.g., leaf litter is about 2 percent nitrogen). And the leaves of maple trees contain chemicals that suppress weed-seed germination (Michigan State University).

Even Scotts, the biggest vendor of lawn fertilizer in the U.S., tells you to mulch — not rake — your leaves.  (And top it off with a bit of fertilizer, of course).  The radical environmentalists at  Scotts summed up the case for leaf mulching pretty well.  (What’s next?  Exxon promoting electric cars?)

When you rake up your leaves, it costs you. Your local taxes pay for trucks to sweep up your leaves or pick up your leaf bags, all of which often end up in landfills. If you burn leaves, you're just sending up clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. Mulching leaves simply recycles a natural resource, giving you richer soil for free.

In short, if you just use a mulching mower to chop up your leaves, rather than rake them up and dispose of them, you’ll end up with a greener lawn with fewer weeds.

The upshot is that more-or-less every suburban homeowner already owns a power tool that eliminates the need to rake leaves.  That’s a radical change from three decades ago.  Once upon a time, that was a specialty piece of equipment called a mulching mower.  Now, near as I can tell, it’s called a lawn mower.  And for the few who don’t have one, the cost of on-site leaf disposal is just the cost of hiring somebody to mow your lawn with a mulching mower.

My point is that, 30 years ago, nobody owned a mulching mower.  Now, if you own a mower, it’s a mulching mower.  To a close approximation, every citizen of my town already owns a tool that allows them to dispose of their own leaves, with minimal effort, on their own property. 

So, why does my home town encourage all citizens to rake their leaves to the curb, for taxpayer-financed pickup and disposal?  Forty years ago, that was a real life-style improvement, because nobody had a convenient way to dispose of fall leaf litter.  Now, everybody does.  So why have we maintained that ancient program, unchanged?

Better yet, #leavetheleaves

Beyond feeding your lawn, leaf litter is reported to play a key role in the life cycle of many beneficial insects, including pollinators.  In particular, both butterflies and fireflies need winter leaf litter to survive.  You can find any number of responsible organizations who tell you not to mulch your leaves but, ideally, just let them be.  Or rake them up and let them decompose naturally.  That, in a nutshell, the worst thing  you can do is have centralized hot-composting of leaves, because that effectively eliminates next year’s butterflies, present in the leaf litter as larvae and pupae.

And many others.

In particular, as this article makes clear, if you pride yourself on your butterfly-friendly garden, then rake your leaves to the curb each fall, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.  You’re basically in the business of attracting butterflies into your yard, so that you can exterminate their offspring.

While many of us are growing more sensitive to the plight of the pollinators, mindfully incorporating pollinator-friendly plants into our gardens in the spring and resisting the urge to use pesticides in our garden all summer, we are unwittingly undoing our hard work and good intentions when we clear away the leaf litter and standing dead plant material in the fall!

What?  You mean I am killing off the very pollinators that I “cultivated” all summer?  Yep.  Ouch!

Caveat:  That said, while many reputable sources say that leaving leaf litter is necessary for butterflies and other beneficial insects, I could not find even one objective study that quantified the impact of it.  So this is one of those things that you just have to take on the faith of expert testimony.   It makes sense, experts say it.  But as far as I know, it has never been quantified.

Nothing stops you from doing some of each

There are two types of people in this world:  Those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.

By which I mean, thinking that you must adopt just one of the methods outlined above is arbitrary.  Nothing stops you from doing a bit of each.

This fall, maybe let some of year leaves alone.  Maybe rake some aside for your own butterfly sanctuary.  Maybe mow some into your lawn and skip the fertilizer in the spring.

All of that reduces the tonnage that the town has to collect.  And that’s unambiguously good.

Nutrient load in local waterways.

Source:  US Geological Survey, presented in this document.

The only significant environmental caveat that I can identify is that leaves left on impermeable areas (such as roadways) end up putting nutrients into the local waterways.  

Unfortunately, the best study of this issue (in Madison, Wisconsin) evalulated a combined program of  leaf collection (asking people to rake their leaves to the curb) and street sweeping.  You can see the full reference at this location.

That said, their conclusion is that frequent street sweeping is far more important than leaf collection, for keeping nutrients out of stormwater.  At least, that’s how I read their summary, emphasis mine:

Collection of only leaf piles, leaving streets unswept, showed no significant reduction in loads of total or dissolved phosphorus and an 83 percent increase in load of total nitrogen. The majority of nutrient concentrations were in the dissolved fraction making source control through leaf collection and street cleaning more effective at reducing the amount of dissolved nutrients in stormwater runoff than structural practices such as wet detention ponds. Based on the results of this study, municipal leaf management programs would be most effective with weekly street cleaning in areas of high street tree canopy, whereas the method and frequency of leaf pile collection is of less importance to the mitigation of nutrients in stormwater runoff.

Source:  US Geological Survey, https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20205109

Beyond that one study, every other reference I can find refers only to the link between tree canopy over the street, and apparent fall nutrient loading in surrounding waterways.  E.g., this one.  Similarly, this one looked at all sources, but pointed to urban trees adjacent to streets as the significant wintertime nutrient source in the watershed it studied.

So it’s pretty clear that if you have leaf-covered streets, the decomposing leaves wash into the storm sewers and add nutrients to local streams.  For sure, the town has a proper role in sweeping the streets in the fall to remove fallen leaves before they can get into the storm sewers.

But as far as I can tell, asking citizens to dispose of their own leaves, on their own property, is not a concern.  Almost all of the research shows that it’s the leaf load on the streets that is the major driver of fall nutrient runoff.  So, absent information to the contrary, I’d assume that as long as the town continues to sweep the streets in the fall, a program of encouraging residents to keep their leaves on their own lot would have no significant implications for compliance with the Chesapeake Bay Act.

Conclusion

Some time in the distant past, my town began a program of mass collection and composting of fall leaves.

This started before before the invention of the mulching mower.  It started decades before it was widely understood that many beneficial insects need the leaf litter to survive, and decades before research made it clear that frequent street sweeping was far more important than bulk leaf removal, for preventing high fall nutrient loads in urban storm water.

And yet, even now, every year, citizens are directed to rake their leaves to the curb, so that we can use our tax dollars to vacuum them up and send them off to be hot composted (i.e. sterilized and broken down in large, hot piles.).

All I’m suggesting is that maybe this needs a change of focus.  The town should de-emphasize centralized leaf collection and instead encourage residents to take care of their own leaves responsibly.  This can be as low-effort as simply mowing the leaf-covered lawn with a mulching mower.  It can take the form of raking the leaves to the edges of the yard to let them slowly decompose (“sheet composting”).  And then focusing the town’s resources on sweeping up whatever leaves end up on the streets.

Sure, allow residents to continue to rake their leaves to the curb for pickup if they wish.  But it’s time to stop encouraging that practice.   And, instead, to promote ways in which citizens can responsibly handle their own fall leaves.

Post G22-032: No-salt pickles 2, the experiment

 

See next post for results

Background

This is a continuation of my just-prior gardening post.

The goal of this experiment is to come up with home canned no-salt sour dill pickle.  Not a refrigerator pickle, not a sweet pickle, not a “low-salt” pickle that has half as much salt as a regular pickle.  But a canned, shelf-stable sour pickle with no or negligible sodium content.  That tastes OK. Continue reading Post G22-032: No-salt pickles 2, the experiment

Post G22-030: Joining pieces of floating row cover the easy way.

 

If you have ever needed to join two sheets of floating row cover, or other spun-bonded or non-woven porous plastic cloth, this post outlines the easy, skill-free way to do that.

In a nutshell:  Use fusible interfacing.

If you know what fusible interfacing is, you probably don’t need to read the rest of this.  The only pro tip is to use a damp pressing cloth, to avoid melting the floating row cover. 

For the rest of you, fusible interfacing is hot-melt fabric glue that comes in thin sheets.  Cut it to size, slip it between pieces of fabric to be joined, press briefly with an iron, and presto, the fabric pieces are joined.

My only value added in this post is in pointing out that this does, in fact, work quite well with floating row cover.  The only other method I’ve seen mentioned is to sew it, which strikes me as both a lot of skilled work, and likely subject to early failure.

Let me put two caveats up front.

First, this seam is strong enough to use, but it’s not as strong as a sewn seam when used on this thin plastic material.  If you stress it enough, you can pull those two pieces of plastic spun-bonded fabric apart.  So far, for me, it is holding up well in my intended use, which is as a cover for a hoop house.  But in that use, it’s just draped over a frame, not stretched taught.  This probably would not work well in an application where the cloth is stretched taught and stressed across the seam.

Second, a hot iron will most definitely melt floating row cover.  (Ask me how I know).  So place a thin, damp cloth over the fabric/interfacing  sandwich before pressing it.

Details follow.  But you’ve already read everything you need to know.

Here’s the end result below, once with the seam sitting flat, once with the seam standing up.  I am sure the floating row cover will fail before the seam will.

FWIW, I moseyed through ironing two 30-foot pieces of row cover together in about ten minutes.  Start-to-finish, it took me far longer to write this up than it took to do it.

Walking that fine line

Sometimes there’s a fine line between thrifty and stupid.  This project may well cross that line. But the facts in my case are the following:

  1. I own a gigantic roll of 8′ wide floating row cover.
  2. I need some that’s at least 12′ wide.
  3. I own an entire bolt of fusible interfacing

Why I own an entire bolt of fusible interfacing, I do not know.  Must have had a reason for it, at some point.  But at this point, it’s been sitting with my sewing stuff so long it’s like an old friend.  I’ll probably be a little sad if I ever finally use it up.

It’s this sort of thing that caused my wife to revoke my Costco membership.

Source:  JoAnn Fabrics

In any case, fusible interfacing is cheap.  I cut mine into 5″ strips, but surely a strip a couple of inches wide would be adequate.  At full retail, above, that’s  $1.29 worth of fusible interfacing, to join two 10-yard pieces of floating row cover.

As long as this works, and doesn’t take a lot of time, I think that puts me on the thrift side of the line.

A few notes on the process.

Tools

As shown above, the only tools you need are

  • an ironing board
  • an iron
  • a pair of scissors
  • a thin, damp cotton cloth.  (A handkerchief or bandana would be ideal.)

The ironing board is optional but makes this a lot easier.  It holds stuff at the right height, it allows the material to glide over it, it’s padded just right for ironing.  In short, it’s the thing that was designed to make ironing easier.  If you lack an ironing board, a towel on a table can be used as the base for your ironing.

The iron should be set to steam, if you have that setting.  Otherwise, set it about halfway between its lowest and highest setting.  The interfacing itself just says “use a hot iron”, so the setting is not critical.  Anything that will melt the glue but not the fabric is OK.

A hot iron will melt floating row cover in no time flat.  That’s why you must use some sort of cover, and why I suggest using a thin damp cloth on top of the assembly to be ironed.  That both presses steam into the cloth, ensuring even heating, and limits the temperature to somewhere around 212F (100C).

Materials handling.

Here’s the trick:  Keep it neat.

It doesn’t matter whether you have additional layers of floating row cover in the stack of material to be ironed.  Just insert the fusible interfacing between the two pieces that you wish to glue together.  So if your row cover comes folded over — leave it that way, and handle it that way.

In my case, the 8′ floating row cover came folded over, on the 4′ long roll.  I left it that way.  I unrolled the length I needed (30′), put a weight on the fabric, unrolled another 30′ back in the direction I started from, and then cut that (total-of) 60′ piece off the roll.

The result was a single, neat, 4′ wide stack of four layers of floating row cover.  Two long folded-over pieces, on top of each other.  In cross-section, it’s like two “U”s on top of each other, with the open sides of both “U”s on the same side.

My goal is to glue together layers 2 and 3, along the open side of the U.  Just as they lie.

If you know anything at all about sewing, you are probably appalled at the thought of making a seam this way.   That is, just by gluing two flat pieces of cloth together as they lay on top of each other.

You’ve probably got an urge to do something that’s stronger, like trying to make a lapped or French seam.  Ignore that urge.  Floating row cover is a beast to handle in this circumstance.  Trying to align large pieces of it, to form any sort of fancy seam, is just asking for trouble.

Just keep it simple.

  1. Take your rolled-up pieces of row cover
  2. Unroll enough to cover the ironing board, with the edge to be glued facing you.
  3. Let the excess fall off the ironing board.
  4. Peel back the top layer(s) and place a strip of fusible interfacing between the layers you want to glue together.  I used strips about 5′ wide, but that’s clearly overkill.
  5. Straighten it up and iron it, with the thin damp cloth on top.  It only takes a second or two for any area, and you only need a light pressure.  If you are unsure of yourself, stop, let it cool for 15 seconds, and test the bond by pulling on it.
  6. Pull fresh material onto the ironing board and repeat.

Take care that the fusible interfacing is ENTIRELY COVERED by the two pieces of that you want glued together.  Whatever it touches, it will glue together.  You can be as sloppy as you want, as long as you don’t accidentally glue together anything other than the two pieces that you want to glue together.

At this point, I think I’ve driven it into the ground.  The only real point is to keep the floating row cover as neat and compact as possible.  Don’t unfold it, roll it up before you move it, and so on.  And mind that the fusible interfacing is not sticking out where you don’t want it.

Extras for experts.

I only used this to create one long seam, but the same technique would work to create a more complex shape.  Any sort of a cover that you could sew, you can create from floating row cover and fusible interfacing.  So, for example, I could fuse a couple of seams perpendicular to the long seam and make a tent-like shape.  And so on.

I am confident that this would work with any porous spun-bonded or non-woven fabric.  As I understand it, fusible interfacing works well because you get a physical bond, as you press the glue through the fibers of the fabric.  This is what allows you to join, with confidence, a low-surface-energy material (poly-whatever-plastic) that would be all-but-impossible to glue up if it were in the form of solid sheets.

That said, I have not literally tried this with Tyvek or similar non-woven fabric.  My guess is that as long as there is a fibrous (as opposed to slick) surface to the fabric, this would work.  But, duly noted, I have not actually done the experiment.  For sure, fusible interface works with just about any traditional (woven, sewable) fabric used in making clothing.

Addendum:  A rebar lesson learned

To use this floating row cover, I had to cut up one 10′ piece of rebar.  Turns out, unless you want to lay out some cash, that’s not quite as easy as most internet sources will suggest.  They’ll tell you all the ways you can (possibly) cut rebar.  Many of which are reasonably cost-effective if you’re going to cut up a ton of rebar.  They won’t really focus on what it’ll cost you if you don’t happen to own the right tool already, and you just want to cut up one piece.

For me, the cost-effective solution was a hacksaw with brand-new blades.  That’s blades, plural.

I should start with what I’m using this for.  This is for my attempt to grow  parthenocarpic cucumbers and summer squash under insect-proof netting (Post G22-013).  Which, in turn, is my way of dodging last year’s plague of cucumber beetles and squash vine borers.

Here’s one of the two hoop-house enclosures that I hope will keep out the squash vine borer and cucumber beetle.  Note the visible seam between the two pieces of floating row cover, created by the fusible-interfacing method outlined above.

The construction of this is standard.  For two hoops, pound four short pieces of rebar part-way into the ground.  Then bow two pieces of 10′ piece of 3/4″ PVC pipe and slip the ends over the protruding pieces of rebar.

I (of course) bought rebar in the cheapest form possible.  In my case, that was 10-foot-long pieces of #3 (3/8″) rebar.  I could have bought it pre-cut, but at a much higher price per foot.

I owned several tools that plausibly would cut 3/8″ rebar, so I figured, hey, I’ll just cut it when I get it home.

Well.

That was when I identified all the tools I owned that either wouldn’t cut #3 rebar or cut it so slowly it would take all day.  These included:

  • Bolt cutters, 24″ — too small to cut the rebar.
  • Jigsaw:  too slow (probably the metal-cutting blade was already dull).
  • Dremel tool with metal cutoff wheel — too slow..

Circular saw? I didn’t want to invest in a $25 metal-cutting blade, to cut up one $6 piece of rebar.

Angle grinder?  I don’t own an angle grinder.  And, as it turns out, looks like all the cheap ones specifically say NOT to use a flat metal cutoff disk.  So I really didn’t feel like investing $100+ in a new, higher end (and dangerous) tool, just to cut up one $6 piece of rebar.

Hacksaw with a dull blade?  No go.

Hacksaw with a brand new carbon-steel blade?  Bingo.  Cut halfway through the bar, then bend it to snap it.  First cut was easy, second was OK, third was work.  Then toss the blade and put in a new one.  I could feel and hear the blade going dull over the course of three cuts.

The upshot is that a hacksaw will work fine, as long as you have a sharp blade.  It’s not even hard work.  But if you use cheap carbon-steel blades, expect to get maybe three cuts per blade.  And if your blade is dull, this basically won’t work at all.

Bottom line:  You can easily cut rebar with a hacksaw and a new, sharp blade.  But the cost of the hacksaw blades used may well offset the savings from buying a single long piece of rebar and cutting it at home.  I’ve since bought a pack of better bi-metallic blades, but I have no idea (yet) of how many cuts you get with a higher-quality blade.

Post G22-029: Ground cherries.

 

My advice on growing ground cherries?  Don’t bother.

X-ray specs and sea monkeys.

This year I’m trying a few new plants in the garden.  For whatever reason, ground cherries caught my eye.  They seemed easy to grow, and the idea of growing something sweet in the garden was appealing.

If you look at the seed catalogues, you’ll see piles of beautiful ripe fruit.  You’ll see the fruit described as “about the size of a cherry tomato”.   You’ll hear the flavor likened to, e.g., pineapple.

And X-ray specs let you see the bones in your hands.  And sea monkeys provide endless amusement.

I bought some some seeds for Cossack Pineapple ground cherries, sprouted them, and transplanted the seedlings to the garden without incident.  They grew just fine, and appear to be thriving in the garden with no help from me.  So ease-of-cultivation is as-advertised.

Here’s the garden plot, below, with a bunch of healthy ground cherry plants.  I have maybe half-a-dozen plants, in about 16 square feet of garden space.

The fruit are unusual.  They have a papery husk like a tomatillo.  So it’s moderately interesting plant, though nothing showy.  It doesn’t really stand out in the garden.

Here’s the first problem:  The fruit is about the size of a pea.  Not a pea pod.  A pea.  OK, maybe a fairly large pea.  But definitely in that ballpark.  Vastly smaller than, say, a typical cherry tomato.  Imagine having to pick your peas by picking one pea at a time.

Oh, did I mention the ground part?  The fruit ripens over an extended period of time, visible as the papery husks change from pale green to pale tan.  You will see it said that the best way to tell if the fruit is ripe is to let it fall to the ground.   My take on it is the only reliable way to get ripe ground cherries is to pick them up off the ground.  As a result, in practice, you harvest these by getting down on hands and knees and rooting around in the mulch, underneath your plants, to find these pea-sized fruits in their cute little papery husks.

Here’s the second problem:  The total yield of fruit is tiny.  Maybe this will get better as the season progresses.  But right now — from a half-dozen of these, covering may 16 square feet — I might be able to pick enough of fruit to match the volume of one (1, a) salad tomato.  And, because I’m impatient, I pick not only what’s on the ground, but I pick some that appear ripe, but are still on the bush.

Here’s what today’s harvest looks like, in the husk, and then peeled:

Note the color variation for both the husks and the fruit.  That’s because I picked a handful up off the ground — those are the ripe yellow ones above — then snagged a few more that were still hanging, but appeared ripe.

Here’s the third problem:  They aren’t sweet.  At least, these aren’t.  Not even the fully-ripe ones.  They do have an unusual taste.  It’s described as being like pineapple, but in fact its only distantly related to that.  Slightly tangy, slightly fruity. It’s definitely pleasant.  Even the green ones have a nice tartness to them.  But it’s not some great delicacy.  It’s nowhere close to being as nice as, say, fresh blackberries.

It’s possible the yield will pick up some, as the season progresses.  It’s possible that other varieties are tastier.  But as of today, my view is that these are an interesting novelty, and nothing more than that.  If you’re willing to get down on hands-and-knees, you can harvest a scant palmful of ripe fruit per day, out of roughly 16 square feet of garden space.  And enjoy an interesting — but not sweet — fruit-like flavor from them.

In the grand scheme of what I could be growing in that space, and using my gardening time for, these are a waste of time and space.  Interesting.  Better than nothing.  But I won’t be growing them again.

 

 

Post G22-028: Low-pressure hose timer autopsy.

 

Edit 7/29/2022:  When all was said and done, I bought another copy of the one that just broke.  I then modified it by drilling two small weep holes, like so:

I then mounted this horizontally (with the dial facing the sky).  In theory, when this leaks — and it will — the weep holes will allow the water to drain without drowning the motor.  Which — see below — is what killed the first one.

Edit 7/11/2024:  That same cheap-o hose timer above is still working.  Granted, it’s only been two years, so I can’t exactly claim victory.  But it’s worth nothing that this one — mounted to drain through the weep holes I drilled — at least didn’t crap out after a year, the way so many of its ancestors did.  I take it in during the winter,  I give it new batteries annually.  It has to open and close twice a day during the summer.  I don’t think it’s too much to ask that $30 should buy me more than just one or two years of service.

The original post follows.

A hose timer is a gizmo for turning water on and off on some pre-set schedule.  You (typically) stick a couple of batteries in it, program it, place it between faucet and garden hose, and turn the faucet on.  It will then operate a little valve to turn that water on and off according to your chosen schedule.

Until it breaks. Which it will.  Which you probably won’t notice until your plants start withering.  Unless you’re away on vacation, that is.  In which case you’ll return to dead plants. Continue reading Post G22-028: Low-pressure hose timer autopsy.

Post G22-027: Using 1/2″ dripline for low-pressure (water barrel) irrigation

 

It works.   It’s a little slow.  But it clearly works.  The flow rates above are per foot of 1/2″ dripline, hooked up to a water barrel.  This particular dripline was rated for 1 gallon/foot/hour @ 25 PSI.

Background.

In my just-prior gardening post (G22-026), I found out just how easy it is to set up drip irrigation.   In less than two hours, I set up drip irrigation for about 400 square feet of garden, divided into four beds.

As described in that post, I used 1/2″ drip line, connected to municipal (high-pressure) water. It was a snap to put together, and it works like a charm.

Blessed relief.  Instead of hauling buckets of water, I turn on the tap.

My only regret is that I couldn’t use that with my existing rain barrels.  The drip line is designed to deliver one gallon per foot per hour, at at pressure of 25 pounds per square inch (PSI).  A system engineered for that pressure surely wasn’t going to work with the 1 PSI water pressure generated by a water barrel.

Or so I thought.

Experimental data.  Accept no substitutes.

I’ve only been a serious gardener for three seasons now.  But one of the first lessons I learned is that a lot of what gets passed off as advice for the home gardener is simply untested and untrue folklore. 

In this blog, I’ve taken pains to test something before repeating it.  The idea being that amateur science beats no science at all.  Hence, I can tell you that (e.g.) poly sheeting is all-but-useless for frost protection, but mason jars provide excellent frost protection.   Not because I read that somewhere, but because I both tested it and can explain why it’s so (Posts G22-005 through G22-008).

Today I’m testing whether I can use 1/2″ dripline for low-pressure (water-barrel) irrigation.  To do that, I’m going to measure the output of that 1/2″ dripline when it’s hooked up to a water barrel. 

Here’s the setup.  That’s a water barrel on a cinder block, 50′ of 1/2″ dripline (rated for one gallon/foot/hour @ 25 PSI), and three Dixie cups.  Plus some bricks to hold it all in place.  Not shown is the kitchen measuring cup use to measure the output.

The experiment consisted of hooking the dripline up to the water barrel.  Letting it drip for 15 minutes.  Then measuring how much water was captured in Dixie cups placed at 1, 25, and 50 pipe-feet away from the water barrel.

The results are tabulated at the start of this posting.  For me, that’s a more-than-adequate and more-than-adequately-uniform water output.  Which means that all I need to do to convert my existing high-pressure irrigation system to low-pressure (water barrel) use is … hook it up to the water barrels and let it run all day.  It will be easy enough to tell how much water I’ve put on the garden just by measuring the drop in the water level in the barrels.

Sometimes a (moving) picture is worth 1000 words.  Click the link below to see a brief video clip showing how rapidly drops emerge from the dripline at 1 PSI.  As soon as I saw this stream of drops, I knew this adequate for use in irrigating the garden.

 

 

Post G22-026, garden irrigation system in two hours.

 

What I don’t know about garden irrigation could fill a book.   Or at least a blog post.

And that’s what the next post is about.  All the things I thought I knew about irrigation that were wrong.

That’s probably going to be a lot more interesting than this post.  Here, I describe the irrigation system I just put into place this morning.  But be warned, the actual, currently-functioning drip irrigation system is boring.*    Its basically a hose that drips.

* Not that “plumbing project” and “excitement” are things any sane person wants to see in the same sentence.  Try:   “I had a little excitement fixing the leaky toilet”, or “I was halfway through changing the faucet washer and that’s when all the excitement started”.   I don’t know about you, but for me, “excitement” in that context does not conjure thoughts of pleasant events.

Sure, it’s a high tech hose creating beautifully uniform drips.  I’ll describe it below in excruciating detail.  But it’s basically a hose with little holes in it.  Plus enough other stuff to get water from the outside tap to that hose.

The more interesting piece of this is everything that wouldn’t/couldn’t/didn’t work.  The system I just put in place is nothing like what I started out to do, outlined in Post G22-016.  My original plan did not survive even the most casual brush with reality.  That process is far more interesting than the finished product.  But that’s for a separate post.

What I did.

Above you see the last bit of my newly-installed drip irrigation system.  The brown hose is 1/2″ drip emitter tubing (a.k.a. dripline).  It has a couple of holes (“emitters”) every foot, carefully constructed to drip one gallon of water per foot per hour, at water pressure of 25 pounds per square inch (PSI).  (For a simple metric-compliant reference, that’s about 1.7 atmospheres).

It’s pinned to the soil with standard steel garden staples (the sort you would use to hold down agricultural cloth or row covers.)  Eventually I’ll cover all that with mulch.

Not seen, that brown “emitter” tubing above connects to solid (no-holes) 1/2″ black distribution tubing.  Irrigation distribution tubing is more-or-less cheap, thin, UV-resistant hose.

Three additional brown drip emitter lines are tee’d off that black tubing, one for each raised garden bed.  That all eventually connects back to the outdoor tap on the back of the house.

All-in, there’s almost 100′ of 1/2″ black distribution tubing now pinned to my lawn, distributing water to four garden beds.  There it connects to pieces of 1/2″ emitter tubing (dripline), which then distributes the water to the soil, one drop at a time.

The furthest end of the system is about about 125 tube-feet from the tap, there’s about 150 feet of emitter tubing total.  All of it appears to be functioning correctly.

There are really no details of construction worth noting.  As constructed, the whole thing just sits on top of the ground, held down by the occasional steel garden staple.  Two 1/2″ emitter tubes, spaced about 2′ apart, seem adequate to water the surface of a 4′ wide raised bed.  The 1/2″ pipes all fit together with fittings made for this exact purpose.  Lay out the tubing, cut it with a knife, slide one end over the fitting as far as it will go, tighten up the locking cap.  That’s it.

Well, maybe there’s one pro tip, but it’s standard advice for anything of this sort:  Tubing, extension cords, rope, and so on.  The tubing comes in a roll.  Unroll the tubing onto the ground, by rotating the coil of tubing about its axis, just as if it were a car tire.  Ideally, pin one end of the tubing to the ground and literally unroll the coil by rolling it on the ground.  Do not uncoil it, that is, do not put the roll of tubing on the ground and pull out what looks like a big, long coil spring made out of tubing.  If you uncoil it, you will almost surely end up kinking the tubing as you handle it, and that is double plus ungood. 

Why:  While it superficially looks the same, unrolling is completely different from uncoiling.  When you uncoil it, each original loop on the roll leaves one rotation along the axis of the tubing.  If you had twenty loops on the original roll, and you uncoil it, sure, it’s laid out in a line, but now it’s as if you’d taken one end of the tubing and given it 20 360-degree twists in a row.   And that high degree of twist along the axis will almost inevitably manifest itself as a kink in the tubing.

Basically, a monkey could do it.  The only tool needed is a knife (or scissors) to cut the tubing.  This took me under two hours this morning, and most of the time was spent maneuvering the emitter tubing around my already-existing plants.  If I’d done this while the beds were still bare, I doubt it would have taken me an hour.

Arguably, shopping for the parts was harder than assembling the system.  In the end, to cover four beds, each maybe 4′ x 25′, I bought/used:

  • 200′ of 1/2″ emitter tubing (“dripline”, with weepholes)
  • 100′ of 1/2″ distribution tubing (no holes).
  • Four figure-of-eight fittings to close the ends of the driplines.
  • Three 1/2″ “tee” couplings and one 1/2″ straight coupling to connect the first three and the last driplines to the distribution line.
  • One in-line pressure reducer
  • One drip irrigation female adapter (to convert the end of the distribution line to garden hose thread).
  • Some garden staples.
  • Optional:  One charcoal filter (see chloramine, below).

I still need to add a timer.

For what it’s worth, if you go with this form of drip irrigation — using emitter tubing or “dripline” instead of individual water emitters — your main choice is between using 1/4″ and 1/2″ emitter tubing (dripline).  I ended up using 1/2″ emitter tubing, and I am glad that I did.  That’s explained just below.

A few details worth noting.

Half-inch versus quarter-inch irrigation tubing: Quarter-inch line is tiny.  

Above you see the ends of two pieces of irrigation tubing.  The small stuff is the nominal 1/4″ tubing.  The larger one is the nominal 1/2″ tubing.

If you are like me, you probably heard the terms “quarter-inch” and “half-inch” and just fuzzily thought, oh, that’s about twice as big.  But even in theory, if the internal diameters were as described, the half-inch line would have four times the internal cross-sectional area.  And in practice, it looks like the half-inch line has around eight times the internal cross-sectional area of the quarter-inch line. 

Which, roughly speaking, means that the half-inch line has eight times the water-carrying capacity, or conversely, can carry water eight times as far before the water pressure in the line gets too low to be usable.  The manufacture recommends limiting runs of half-inch dripline to 240′ or less, compared to limiting runs of quarter-inch dripline to 33′ or less.   Or about one-eighth the distance.

That has a lot of benefits.

First, you can cover a garden bed just by running one long piece of 1/2″ emitter line back-and-forth.  That’s less work that cutting and connecting many short pieces of 1/4″ emitter line.  In my case, my 4′ wide garden beds required just one piece of emitter line, twice the length of the bed, run up one side and down the other.  Basically, it’s no different from running a soaker hose up and down the length of the bed.  That means need to make just one cut in the supply line, and insert one “tee” connection to connect the emitter line to the black supply line.

Second, the 1/2″ emitter line also serves to distribute the water, in addition to dripping it into the soil.  This adds considerable flexibility down the road.  It carries enough water that you can easily tap into it.  So, for example, if I now wanted to add some additional emitters in the same garden bed, or add a stretch of 1/4″ drip line, I could just add those directly onto the existing half-inch emitter line.

I see just four downsides to the 1/2″ emitter line.  First, it’s stiff, which makes it harder to install (particular, as here, installing it in beds where the plants are already growing).  Second, it provides a less-even distribution of water.  It appears to come with a minimum emitter spacing of one foot, and emitters that release one gallon per foot per hour, whereas the 1/4″ emitter line is commonly available with emitters spaced every half-foot, emitting a half-gallon per hour.  Third, you have to connect it to the supply line with a tee fitting that costs about $3, whereas the 1/4″ emitter line connects to the supply line with a little push-in “spike” fitting that costs maybe $0.25 each.  Finally, it costs slightly more per foot than the 1/4″ emitter line.

Chloramine filter.

I added a a high-volume activated charcoal filter to remove chloramine from the tap water.  These days, no matter where you live, if you rely on public utilities for your water, chances are that your water is treated with chloramine, not chlorine.  And that makes a big difference to some plants.

Once upon a time we had chlorinated water in the DC area.  They literally used chlorine gas.  And that’s volatile.  Spray that on your garden, or put it in a bucket, give it a little time, and most of the chlorine would simply evaporate right out of the water.

But volatility is a liability if you want to maintain a safe water supply with old pipes.  Now our water is treated with chloramine, not chlorine.  Chloramine is persistent, and does not produce as many by-products as chlorine.  The upshot is, it stays in the water unless you take extreme measures to remove it.

Some plants do not tolerate chloramines well.   In the garden, for example, I find that my peas bleach and die if I water them with straight tap water.  It seems to be immediately toxic to the ground cover “sweet woodruff”.  Many seeds are reported to germinate poorly if watered with water containing chloramine.

So when I water with tap water, I do my best to filter out the chloramine.

It costs a bit, but only a bit, to take this extra step.  The high-throughput charcoal filters like the one linked above are good for somewhere around 10,000 gallons.  At that rate, removing the chloramine adds about $3 per 1000 gallons to the cost of city water.  I currently pay about $17 per 1000 gallons (combined water and sewer rate) for municipal water itself.  So if I’m going to water my garden with city water, chloramine removal only adds modestly to the resulting financial pain.

Pressure regulator.

The manufacturer of this line recommends putting a pressure regulator in-line, to restrict pressure to 25 PSI.  That regulator cost about $10, but it seemed like a good idea to follow the directions despite the cost.  It just screws into the overall assembly using standard hose threads.  So I added one.

I don’t think the strength of the tubing itself is the problem.  It looks to me like the various connectors (tees and such) are a little iffy for high-pressure use.

In any case, given that this was the first time I’d ever done one of these, I figured I ought to follow the manufacturer’s directions.   And that includes putting a pressure regulator in-line.

Other manufacturers use “pressure balance” lines and such.  That struck me as being unnecessarily complicated and possibly prone to clogging.  Here, I have one pressure regulator and large-diameter lines to carry the water.  It’s hard to see what could go wrong with that.

Possible conversion to using raw rain water.

There is some possibility that the large-diameter 1/2″ emitter line could be used with a gravity-fed low-pressure (“rain barrel”) system.  I’m skeptical that would work well, but I see people on YouTube who appear to have functioning irrigation set up that way.  For sure, given the low pressure of a typical rain-barrel system (maybe 1 PSI), there’s a far greater chance that will work over a distance with the larger-diameter emitter tubing compared to the 1/4″ tubing.

The point is that there is some possibility that I could just hook up my rain barrels to the installed system and (slowly) water the garden that way.  Either purely gravity-fed, or using a small submersible pump.

I’m definitely going to have to test that before I declare that works.  At the minimum, that’s going to be a slow process, for sure.  These emitters let out one gallon per hour at 25 PSI pressure.  At somewhere around one PSI, what takes the current tap-water system an hour to deliver should take a gravity-fed system at least a day.

If it will work at all.  Some forms of water distribution simply don’t work at all at such low pressures.  Most timers require at least 10 PSI.  Soaker hoses require 8 to 10 PSI.  And, of course, anything designed to spray water at 25 PSI will only dribble it, at best, at 1 PSI.

Winterization remains a mystery at this point.

I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea to leave plastic pipes full of water out to freeze over the winter.  And I’m too lazy to bury them.

From what I gather, the emitter lines will take care of themselves, slowly emptying out as long as one emitter on the line is at a low point.  The problem is the black distribution piping, where I have multiple low spots between my various raised garden beds.

Tentatively, I’m planning to hook my shop vac up to one end of the distribution line, open up the ends of the emitter lines,  and let ‘er rip.  Basically, blow the water out of the system at the end of the year.

If that doesn’t work, well, with 1/2″ tubing throughout, this really is no different from a bunch of garden hoses.  I’ll winterize it as I winterize my garden hoses.  Just pull them up, empty the water out as I roll them up, and store my irrigation system in a corner of the garage.

 

Post G22-025: Ripe tomatoes in June

 

 

Visualize!

This year I planted nine short-season/cold tolerant tomato plants, three each of Glacier, Fourth of July, and Stiletz. These varieties tolerate cool nights and so can be set out in the garden about a month earlier than most tomato varieties.  They produce ripe fruit quickly, with two of the three advertising less than 60 days to maturity.

That combination gives you the promise of having some ripe tomatoes quite early in the year. And this year, I am pleased to report that this promise has been fulfilled.  I ate my first ripe tomato out of the garden today.  And it’s not even officially summer yet.

I think that’s pretty good for gardening in Zone 7 without a greenhouse.

So, how did that first ripe tomato taste? Eh, pretty much like a tomato.  Not bad, but nothing to write home about, either.  I’m sure that in the days before decent grocery-store tomatoes became available, I’d have thought it a miracle on a vine.  But now, with (e.g.) Campari tomatoes available year-round, that first fresh tomato was nice, but nothing you couldn’t buy at Safeway.

Above:  A couple of ripe Glacier tomatoes, the winners in this year’s short-season tomato race, 6/20/2022.

Above:  Some almost-ripe Fourth of July tomatoes, on 6/20/2022.  These came in second, but they are clearly going to live up to their name.

For Mature Audiences Only

Now that I have have my first ripe tomato, with the promise of more to follow, I can finally address a question that has been nagging me ever since I decided to try this.

What does “days to maturity” actually mean?  From what starting point, to what end point, under what conditions?  I’ve seen this on seed packets all my life.  I’ve never been quite sure what it means. 

Let me use these two short-season tomato varieties to illustrate the issue.  I planted these in the garden on 4/10/2022.  I started them from seed about a month earlier.  Here’s how the actual days to first ripe fruit compare to the “days to maturity” on the seed packets:

As you can see above, in this case the actual elapsed time between sowing the seeds and the first mature fruit was about twice the stated “days to maturity”.

Is that typical?  I can’t even ask that question until I figure out what seed sellers mean by “days to maturity”.

As with so much of home gardening, I see a lot of folklore and wrong answers along with the correct information.  But even with that, and putting aside all the variations that might arise due to the weather, the soil, the length of the day, and so on, I believe that there is literally no standard definition of what “days to maturity” actually measures. 

So, at the end of the day, its no wonder that I don’t know what it means.  It’s not really a well-defined term.

Let me now summarize, as best I can, kind of the gist of what it is supposed to mean.  This is based mainly on the information found in these three sources:

For plants that are traditionally started indoors, in pots, then transplanted to the garden, days to maturity is defined as the number of days between:

  • the time that a seedling that is ready to be transplanted is put into the ground, and
  • the time the first fruit is ripe enough to be picked for eating,
  • under optimal conditions (temperature, day length, water, fertilizer).

For plants that are traditional directly sown into the soil, days to maturity is defined as the number of days between:

  • the time you plant the seed …
  • or maybe the time the planted seed sprouts …
  • or maybe the time the sprouted seed shows its first true leaves, and
  • the time the first fruit is ripe enough to be picked for eating,
  • under optimal conditions (temperature, day length, water, fertilizer).

No matter how you slice it, there’s a ton of ambiguity in those definitions.  At what point is a seedling ready to be transplanted?  What does ripe mean (e.g., for cucumbers that can be used either small, as pickling cukes, or larger, as slicers).  Does the clock start when you plant the seed, or a couple of weeks later when you see the first true leaves?

On top of that, planting at the times where this figure really matters — early spring or late fall — guarantees that you won’t have optimal growing conditions.  There’s a nice discussion of this point in the Garden Betty blog cited above.  So, these figures will be the least reliable just when you’ll be counting on them the most..

Finally, it almost goes without saying that different seed vendors are going to define and measure “days to maturity” differently.  So while “days to maturity” might give you some general guidelines as to what will ripen first, within a given seed vendor, you probably can’t compare them across vendors.  Likely this explains why my actual observed days to maturity above, under identical growing conditions, are in the reverse order of the vendor-stated days to maturity.  Plausibly one vendor uses a more aggressive definition than the other.

A practical takeaway from a novice gardener

I get the fact that YMMV.  I did not expect to see mature fruit appear exactly “days to maturity” after I set out my plants.

What I didn’t understand — before focusing on this — is that your mileage may vary a lot.  When you see a “days to maturity” number, you can’t reliable expect to see ripe in that time, plus or minus a few days.  Instead, I’m guessing that there’s never a “minus” — that those day counts are under absolutely ideal conditions.  And then, you can’t be surprised if the actual day count is several weeks longer than the days to maturity figure, even if you’ve started the seeds weeks before you planted the seedlings in the ground (and thereby started the “days to maturity” clock).

This explains, I think, why I totally failed to grow summer squash last fall, after the squash vine borer (SVB) left for the year.   Planting a late-season crop is a commonly-mentioned strategy for avoiding the SVB.  So, after I observed my last SVB last year, I put a few summer squash seeds into the ground.  I had far more than 60 days of growing season left, which is the approximate “days to maturity” of the varieties I was growing.  But I got no squash.

Let me do the math, in light of this new-found knowledge.  Typical first frost date in this area is October 15.  Stated days to maturity is 60.  But in that cooler, short-day climate, I can count on it being at least 90.  But that’s measured from the time you have a pot-grown plant that is ready to be transplanted into the garden.  So chuck on another 30 days to raise the seedling from seed to “ready to transplant”.  But that’s from the time the very first squash appears.  So add at least another 21 days if you want to get a mere three weeks of actual production out of those squash plants. Now add that up.  And, of course, put it all in a spreadsheet.

The upshot is that for a fall crop of summer squash: a) I should have planted the seeds weeks ago, but more importantly, b) I can’t actually grow a fall crop of summer squash, out in the open, in this climate, that avoids the SVB.  I’d have to set the plants out in the garden squarely in the middle of SVB season.

The bottom line is that if I want a fall crop of summer squash, without pesticides, I’m going to have to start out by growing my squash seedlings under insect-proof netting.  Which is exactly what I’m doing with my parthenocarpic varieties now.  The only difference is that I’d be able to take that netting off after the first six weeks in the garden.

It’s possible that I’ve overstated the fudge-factor here, given that I’d have to start these in the garden pretty much at the start of summer anyway.  But even if I completely removed that 30-day fudge factor, I’d still have to put these plants in the garden weeks before the typical end of SVB season.

The ultimate takeaway here is that if you use “days to maturity” for estimating the last viable planting date for a fall crop, you need to add a lot to the raw number.  You need to add in the minimum number of days over which you’d like the plants to be productive.  You need to add a fudge factor for what are likely to be sub-optimal growing conditions.  And then, for plants traditionally started indoors, you need to add in the time to produce your garden-ready seedling from the seed.

And when I do that, for summer squash and Zone 7, it turns out that I can’t dodge the squash vine borer by aiming for a fall crop of summer squash.  If you don’t want to use pesticides, the only thing the fall crop gives you is the ability to remove the insect netting from the squash some weeks before the plant is due to begin setting fruit.