Spring is almost here… another 20 hours give or take… time to start planning!
April – add another coarse of 3.5″x5″x8′ minigarden ties to the raised beds #1, 2, 3, 6. We’ll need about 18 of them? at about $6 per from Home Dept, Rona, or Lowes.
May – will need 15 yards of garden mix dirt to top up the taller raised beds #1, 2, 3, 6.
Will also need to top up beds 7, 8, 4 and 5. Basically all of them. This is somewhere around $35/yard + 75 delivery or $600
Also at the same time, about 30 bags of Sheep compost from Canadian Tire at about $3/bag
These will be mixed at about 1 bag /50ft^2. That’s about $60
The dirt and compost will be tilled in at least a week before we start planting.
After tilling we are going to attempt to lay out irrigation tape hooked into our rain barrel system. Veg beds #1, 2 and 3 will be fed from a supply hose coming from two 50gal rain barrels fed from the eaves system. They also can be refilled from the well allowed to sit and warm up to ambient temperature and then used to irrigate the veg.
The tape will lay in a shallow trench and then covered up with loose earth.
Anyway you look at it, this will be better than watering by hand in the 6am morning with cold well water. Spraying the plants and not the ground, lots of evaporation and runoff, and a lot of time. Or much later at night when it start to cool down.
Starting with a full rain barrel, the 200 feet of tape should take a couple of hours to drain out 450 litres. If it will be dry for the forseeable future, we refill the barrels in the evening from the well and let them sit until the next watering session.
We tried to track our garden expenses one year. It worked for awhile at the beginning but then fell down through the mid and end periods as it got too busy.