Moderator SunshineKid-GardenCoach
ModeratorForum Replies Created
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I am a garden coach and landscape/garden designer. We are in a rural area but only about 20-30 minutes from city. I do consultations for clients that want to upgrade their landscapes and want to know what is best to plant in their environments, do designs and drawings for clients that need HOA approvals, educate clients on organic gardening principles, distributor for modular raised bed and organic fertilizers and consultations for clients that have purchased property and want to identify native plants and their benefits. Also do speaking engagements/presentations to various groups on gardening topics. Left the corporate world in 2017 as a software consultant.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by SunshineKid-GardenCoach.
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This reply was modified 2 years, 3 months ago by
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There are fields on your profile page under the Privacy settings to enter your City, State and County information. However, these fields are not required and the user can decide whether to make the information public or private.
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There is a field on your profile page to enter your City, State and County but it is not a required field and you can decide whether you want this information to be public or private information.
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Subscribed!
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Looks great!
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Great idea!
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Hey Tag,
Count me in for helping with the forums.
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Hey Julie, did you try clicking on the title the feed “250,000 SUBSCRIBERS on YT Giveaway”?
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Found Deep South Homestead through my husband, he started watching and I joined him, we live in Willis, TX. The Alexa Pure Water Pitcher would be the item I would like to have. Congratulations on hitting 250,000 subscribers on YT!
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Hello @Bright_Sunday , my husband, @Private_Cluck , asked me to post the information about the sub-irrigated buckets we grow in.
A little background on how we started growing in buckets – when we bought our property we wanted to start a garden but were busy working on our house and had little time to work on putting a full scale garden. I did want to plant some tomatoes so started with drilling some drainage holes in the bottom of some 5 gallon buckets and planting in them. That worked fairly well but there were some issues that I wanted to resolve:
1) Fire ants kept coming up through the bottoms of the buckets and creating colonies, not fun! And didn’t want to treat them since I was growing food so had to be careful when picking the fruit and pruning the plants.
2) The soil was drying out too quickly. I was still working full time so would get up early in the morning and water the buckets but by the time I got home in the evening our hot Texas sun had dried out the buckets. I would water thoroughly again but it took a while to get each bucket watered as the dry soil had pulled away from the bucket sides and the water would run down the sides and out the bottom of the buckets for a while until I could get the soil moist enough to expand enough.
3) With the inconsistency of the moist and dry soil, the tomatoes would often get cracks in them.
I did some research and came across the concept of sub-irrigated containers in which there is a water reservoir at the bottom of a growing container. My first thought was wouldn’t my plants get root rot from growing into the water. I then found some information about the importance of having an 1″ of air space between the water reservoir and the soil level with only a wicking mechanism that set in the water. The air space is critical to prevent the root from growing down into the reservoir. When on most plants are exposed to air, they root prune and stop growing.
I found some examples of how to create a SIP (Sub-Irrigated Planter) and decided to experiment with growing some tomato plants in the single buckets I had been using and growing some of the same varieties in some sub-irrigated buckets. I started with about 2 each of several different tomato varieties and planted 1 set in the single buckets. I had to go out of town so wasn’t able to plant the second set of tomato plants in the sub-irrigated buckets until two weeks later. I snapped a photo of both sets of buckets after I finished planting the second set of plants on April 24, 2018. In that photo, the single bucket tomato plants had a two week head start growing in their larger container so they where now about 6″ taller that the plants I planted in the sub-irrigated buckets. On May 22, 2018, I took another photo, and the difference in the size and vigor of the two set of plants was amazing! The benefits of the new sub-irrigated buckets were:
1) Solved the issues of ants colonizing my buckets as there were no holes on the bottom of the reservoir bucket allowing the ants to enter the bucket. If they tried to enter the bucket through the overflow holes on the sides of the bucket, they were washed out when I filled the reservoir.
2) The soil in the buckets stayed consistently moist but not too moist due to the wicking of the water up from the reservoir. This eliminated the issue of cracks in the tomatoes.
3) It took much less time and water to water the plants. The single buckets took several minutes each day to re-moisten the soil that had dried out and most of it ran out on the ground, I could go up to about 3-5 days between watering if necessary because water remained in the reservoir wicking up slowly through the bucket. I usually topped off the reservoir every 1-2 days and only took about 30 seconds or less to fill. I also knew immediately when the reservoir was full as I could watch the overflow holes and stop watering as soon as water started to trickle out the holes.
4) My plants were much healthier and required less fertilization because the nutrients didn’t wash out onto the ground like what was happening when I had to water the single buckets. If we got some rain, the nutrient would flow into the reservoir and would be wicked back up to through the soil.
I have attached the two photos I took showing the progression of my experiment in about 30 days and a pdf file of the instructions on how to build your own SIP. I had some of the cherry tomato plants still producing into winter and moved the buckets into my greenhouse and was still getting a handful of tomatoes the following January.
The other issue is that we have heavy clay soil and still battle fire ants anytime we plant directly in the ground so we mainly grow in raised beds or the SIPs. We now have 220+ SIPs in our garden right and will be adding another 100 sets for this fall. We grow tomatoes, pepper, cucumbers, summer squash, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, peas. We use 42″ tomato cages in the buckets for any plants that need support, they fit the buckets really well. We also now use drip irrigation on a timer to water the buckets as hand watering that many buckets became an issue.
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Hey Tag, I think there is a bug with some new notifications. Some notifications default to the Unread section and they should stay there until the user either click on them which changes the status to Read or deletes them. However, I am having some notifications show up on the Read section even though I did not click on them. This seems to happen when I am not active on the site. I know know to click over to the Read section to clear them but just something to add to the list to address. Thanks!
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Hey Julie,
In the area called discussion forums, click on the Web button and you will see the option to uncheck getting a web notification when new discussions you are subscribed to have a new message posted.
To clear existing notifications on your phone, go to the bell icon at the top right corner of your screen, click on View Notifications, then click on the Read button. You can delete them individually by clicking on the Trash can icon, or delete multiple or all of them by using the Bulk Actions feature.
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Yes, it is going to be great to support like minded business owners!
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I checked out you website, beautiful products! They should sell great on the Freesteading marketplace. Can you do any logo signs?
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What is your business? Freesteading.com has a Marketplace in the works, maybe an option to grow your business.