Garden

[Flatbush]

Love the planter boxes, they are pretty and gay. They really catch the eye.

[ECBG]

You're SO fortunate!  I have SO much shade I'm the hosta and fern queen!

[gardenman]

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@ECBG wrote:

You're SO fortunate!  I have SO much shade I'm the hosta and fern queen!

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There's a fair amount of shade here. The porch faces east with one end facing south and the other north. The porch roof has a good sized overhang that also provides mid-day shade. The plants get decent light, but nothing like full sun. By around eleven in the morning the porch is in the shade. The plants don't seem to mind though. With the porch painted white, it helps reflect what light there is to the plants also. I rely a lot on impatiens and begonias, but geraniums and petunias tend to do well also, along with dahlberg daisies and lobelias. It's far from full sun for the plants, but they grow well anyway. I just limit plants to those that only grow ten to twelve inches high or less so they don't outgrow the four inch pots.

[Dazlin]

BEAUTIFUL, GREAT IDEAS TO WATER!!

[Lucky Charm]

I am blown away by your devotion to using rain water for flowers.

Being in south Jersey, the rain we've had is quite good (that rain last night and tonight!!!).  Can you offset the watering system in the event you had a good downpour and keep it for when it hasn't rained?

I try to conserve water too, unfortunately we had and *on demand* water heater put in and as you know, at least a gallon can be wasted before it gets really hot, if not used for a while.  I fill up a huge pitcher and keep that for my front steps planters or the ones on the back deck.  (I only want the hot hot hot water for when I turn on the dishwasher, so I don't waste gallons of water all day.)

[gardenman]

@Lucky Charm 

Normally too much rain isn't an issue, but this has been a very wet spring. I thought 220 gallons would be more than adequate, and there would never need to be more standing by. I was wrong. I could add additional stock tanks (the 110 gallon ones I bought at Tractor Supply aren't terribly expensive) but where to put them becomes an issue. I have an overflow on the one on the south side of the porch that now directs any surplus water to a potted brugmansia, watering it in the process, that I could connect to another stock tank, but I just don't want to lose the yard space. I also have rain barrels out back that hold another hundred plus gallons for the backyard plants, so I seldom need the hose to water anything.

Where I live we're on a shallow well and septic, so you try to be very conservative using water. Rain water makes a great alternative to well water. It's at ambient temperature, so there's no temperature shock to the plants. Unlike city water that's treated with chlorine/chloramine, there's nothing to interfere with natural bacteria and microscopic life that co-exist with healthy plants. (I have a pet theory that at some point researchers will discover that chlorinated water is bad for both soil bacteria in our gardens and the bacterial colonies in our guts.) The rain water is essentially free to use, relatively pure, and easy to collect. I'm using the Oatey Mystic Rainwater Collection System to divert the water from the downspouts, and they work great. In a sealed system they'd only fill the rain barrels until they were full then send the water back down the downspout, but my system isn't a sealed sytem, so they just keep pouring the water into the stock tanks. They're easy to install in that you just cut out a six inch section of downspout, slide one half up, set the bottom piece in place, slide the top half down to engage the bottom and attach the hose.

If I was younger and more agile I could hide additional stock tanks under the porch, but having that much exposed water sitting under a wooden porch is probably not ideal. I'd probably need some sort of custom cover for the stock tanks if I tried doing that and servicing the pump would be much more of a challenge in a confined space. 

[gardenman]

Some of the self-bonsai'ed impatiens are now flowering. I potted them up in four inch pots and they're still not really growing, but they're flowering. Bear in mind these plants are now almost five months old..A few of those in the Jiffy 7's are still less than an inch high, some have just two real leaves on them. These are barely an inch high. After nearly five months. Yeah. Some sort of growth/germination inhibitor was in those Jiffy 7's. 

 

The good news is the thunbergia are starting to climb up and across the railings and flower. Hopefully by the end of summer they'll have formed a solid backdrop behind the planter boxes.

I see what people mean about photos taking forever to upload these days. It is a lot slower than it was recently.