Texas Gardening: Vines for an arbor?, 1 by KirkH

KirkH wrote:
Hi drthor - Here are some pics from my garden. The trellis is full of life, white icicle radishes are ripe and the asparagus is producing about 8 to 10 spears per day :-). Everything else are just little sprouts for now.

I should mention that I made this as a square foot garden in the back corner of my back yard. When I first built it I had never gardened before and my nephew had given me Mel's book for Christmas. Instead of using cedar to outline the raised beds I used some white Texas chopped stone. The first year I made 3 beds and dry stacked the stones. The next year I thought that it looked a bit sloppy so I mortared them in place (first I prepared underground PVC pipes for a future watering system but I did hand watering for at least 2 years). Often I still hand water because it is so enjoyable. I liked gardening so much that the next year I added a 4th garden and finally last year I added 4 more, I built a short retaining wall and then fenced in the entire garden. Then I filled the inside of the Garden enclosure between the beds with decomposed granite for a nice clean look.

To mark the squares I first tried string and some spare trim wood (as recommended in Mel's book) but it did not look very finished out compared to the mortared stone. Then I had an idea, I used the extra PVC pipe alone with angle joints and end caps to make the squares - it looked great. Now, 2 years later they still seem to look new!

I was not sure what I wanted to do re: watering. I thought I would eventually add a drip system or drip hoses or little sprinkler heads but for some reason never got around to it. Then I saw something on youtube that helped me come up with a great idea. To use the existing PVC I was using to mark the squares to also deliver the water.

You can seen in the Gnome picture how I connected the water to the pipes. I drilled 4 small holes into the PVC inside of each square. Since there is a valve in each raised bed I can control the pressure of each to keep them all uniform and I did not need to glue any of the PVC joints together. Super easy!

Here is a link to a short video showing how it is working.

[HYPERLINK@dl.dropbox.com]