We’ve just installed T-Frames, and just in time, as tomatoes are over a foot tall and starting to bend over, cucumbers and beans are producing tendrils, and melons are vining also. We will be having our students install wire on top and bottom, and attaching baling twine “strings” between them tomorrow.
Watering is also SO important in hot weather, and we are working on making the irrigation easier, so that the couple who will inherit the responsibility of running the garden in only 3 weeks (!) will be able to handle 80 beds without killing themselves or hating us. We are installing short sections of clay pipe at the heads of the 28 beds in the smaller garden, and providing metal sheet to cover the ends when not wanting water to go into the bed. In the field of 52 beds the top end is open, but we have larger pieces of sheet metal to cover several beds, so only the ones we want get watered.
Everyone will get a good workout with the 2-way hoes this week, as the warm weather brings out the weeds, and we want to get them when they are tiny (we’ve already weeded a couple of times).
We are seeing some interesting symptoms of deficiency on just a few plants. This will be an interesting test, to see if the students have been paying attention as they’ve watched the lectures and studied The Garden Doctor books by Jacob R. Mittleider.
These folks are Really getting an education on growing food, and they seem to be loving it. We’ll see if they love ME after they spend several house each day in this hot sun, doing all of the above, as well as building about 25 new beds for additional planting.
