LOWES CAN SCREW UP ANYTHING

NEVER SHOP AT LOWES

You will be sad, they have a way of screwing up even the smallest order and it does not matter if you're buying more, they will just screw that up more.

Count your pieces, they shorted us a 10-foot piece of PVC pipe and 5-female to female connectors.

Raccoon Bucket Party

Planning For Vegetables at P2

This post is the start of the P2 R&D veggie lab.  It's a work in process and will evolve as I try and fail/succeed with lots of vegetables.  I found a great blog entry here that discussed the three growing seasons for a subtropical zone (albeit Australia so ignore the seasons/months!).

Green font means I've tried it and it grows great here.

1. Temperate gardening season

• Best time for cool season vegetables.
• This is the time to grow cabbages, broccoli, kale, carrots, garlic onions, turnips, swedes, peas, Chinese cabbage and Asian greens, and is the best time of year for salad greens such as lettuce, rocket, parsley and coriander. 
• Collards!

2. Spring through to early summer is more like a warm temperate (Mediterranean) summer and tropical dry season – hot and dry. This is the season for planting artichokes, peppers, capsicum, eggplant (aubergine), zucchinis, squash, cucumbers, pumpkin, sweet corn, basil, tomato, beans, and for establishing tropical veg that require a long growing season like gourds, luffa, cassava, yams etc.

3. Summer to early Autumn is the Wet Season and ideal for crops typical of the humid tropics. Most of these crops are actually planted in the latter part of the dry season and grow through the wet for autumn harvest. Typical summer crops include cassava, yam, taro, yacon, turmeric, snake beans, shallots, warrigal greens, snake gourd, bitter melon, Ceylon spinach (malabar spinach), okinawa spinach, kang kong and other tropical greens.

The biggest takeaway on tropical greens:

• plant collards every winter
• plant malabar spinach every spring
• plant/grow okinawa spinach all year long

WATERING ALL THE BAMBOO AND BY THE POLE BARN

Friday and Saturday were spent installing 1" Schedule 40 PVC behind the bamboo, these are fed by a new manifold at the sprinkler pump that allows the full pump output to be delivered to any of four areas. Now we can get adequate pressure in each of the four areas to really deliver some water.

Zone 1 = South gate pipeline

Zone 2 = Paradise Beach area bananas and Palm Island

Zone 3 = ALL THE BAMBOO on Bamboo Beach

Zone 4 = Food Forest and Polebarn areas.

I've been experimenting with Rainbird impact type sprinklers that I've seen used at commercial nurseries. A single impact sprinkler now waters the entire banana field at the south end of the big pond.

A pair of impact sprinklers are watering the Food Forest area.

A single metal impact sprinkler is watering all the plants by the pole barn.

The sprinklers watering the Bamboo are popup lawn sprinklers that we buy at Home Depot. These have a gear drive mechanism inside and they don't require as much water as the impact sprinklers do. Seven of these are on the Bamboo zone and all run at once delivering very targeted watering to the bamboo.

Melnor yard spinklers and garden hoses are a thing of the past in the bamboo area, I'm sure the lawn guys are going to be happy about this.

TEMPORARY HOSE BRIDGE
To get the water back to the pole barn I tried to keep it out of sight. There are many trees lining the route and this makes it impossible to dig down to bury an irrigation pipe.

To connect the source to the Pole Barn requires a single 50' length of garden hose. This will be replaced in the near future and we'll post pictures when it's complete.

Bamboo Food 3/17/2018

Happy St. Patrick's Day!  Today the bamboo - ALL of the bamboo - got a scoop or two of Osmocote fertilizer to get it going.  We already have two canes....  the 1st 2018 cane was at the south gate, on one of the propagated original recipe bamboo plants.  It popped out in early January, which was amazing.  The 2nd 2018 cane Mark noticed today behind Sam and Dave, two of the three large Seabreeze bamboo 10 gallons that we bought at Beautiful Bamboo last year.  It's a fat Seabreeze cane, and it tells me we're going to have a great bamboo year.

The weather has been SO perfect and dry, it's been bug free.  Which is AMAZING for Florida!  Mark has been bouncing in and out of the A-J and 1-10 bamboo clumps installing an amazing new watering system.  Today is the 1st day that all of the bamboo is being watered simultaneously with one output from the pond pump watering system.

Yesterday was the day Mark revamped the watering distribution system.  Photos to come here....

Feedin' the Coons - aww

Feedin' the Coons

March 10th Banana Update

Between being sick with a virus off and on for a few weeks, plus incredibly busy at work, I haven't kept up on the latest P2 news.  Here's the latest!

• On about March 1st, a flower making battle ensued between old friends Swamp King and Lisa.  You'll recall that both Swamp King and Lisa spent a LONG time in the pool cage side by side.  Even after the other bananas left, they remained since they were spectacular tall bananas with large perfect leaves.  We finally made the decision to get them out of the pool cage when the bugs were nasty last year, and they got planted in Banana Beach in December, side by side.  They did great for a while, lost some leaves in the February freeze, and then came back strong. So when Lisa put out a flag leaf and started to push out a flower, Swampy would not be shown up, and he put out the fastest flag/flower I've seen yet.  Swampy's flag and flower arched over and started opening in 24 hours, well before Lisa's flower even made it up and out of the center.  Swampy 1, Lisa 0.  They both have tiny bananas forming... pictures coming soon!
• The mystery banana near the end of Banana Grand Prix (farthest north) also created a flag leaf and flower a week or so ago, but the flower is taking it's time reaching up and out of the center, so no opened flower yet.  This banana plant had a HUGE trunk, a few inches bigger than Swampy or Lisa, so maybe it takes longer for the bananas to push though when the trunk is that big.
• I planted tomato, papaya, wing bean, watermelon and some other seeds out back a few weeks ago, but the weather didn't warm up as quick as I'd hoped, so they're getting a slow start.  
• A note on the malabar spinach:  It didn't do well in January and February, and is just starting to come back.  Seems that the plant doesn't regrow from the roots, but rather needs to be started from seed.  I'll have more time in April to plot the next batch of malabar spinach, but for now it's hit or miss.

Invaders attack!

Mark spent the day making models of invaders attacking, and here's a gif to show an example of the MANY models he made to use for photography.

It is already March, the critters outside abound, watching them is a wonderful way to pass the time