Batch of alfalfa tea almost ready

I have been making a batch of alfalfa tea in a 5 gallon bucket for the garden. It has been about 5 days so far and it seems like it's just about ready to be used. I plan on using it as a foliar spray and then pour any left overs over the soil to drench the plants. I've read to let it brew for up to 12 days in the winter months. Since it's been in the 80's here recently,  plan to use it before day 8. I stir it at least once a day with a large stick to add oxygen. My method is to pack  as much alfalfainto a 5 gallong bucket as I can, then fill with water.

Alfalfa hay added to the top of our raised garden beds in Arizona

A few days back I added a top dressing of alfalfa hay to our raised garden beds here in Arizona. Since we are leaving our hot temps, sort of, the cool nights will be here soon and the alfalfa hay around the plants will act like a blanket of sorts for our plants. It also adds some nutrients to the soil as it breaks down as well as adding a cool look to the entire raised garden bed. I plan on covering these raised garden beds with frost cloth when the real winter weather gets here.

Here are a few photos:

 This our larger of the two raised garden beds. The large empty looking space closest to us has a lot of herbs, however, yesterday I added a lot of flowers in this area to help bring in the beneficial insects.

The dark brown color of the soil to the left of the raised bed is not run-off or run-under from the raised bed, however, it is from spraying the hose. When our rain barrels are set up I hope to eliminate using the hose from the house and use only stored rain water.

 This is our smaller of the two raised garden beds.

Another picture of our smaller raised garden bed and our wine barrel with some wild flowers and other great looking flowers.

So many seeds sprouting in our garden

The heat here in Arizona has been on a steady increase for some reason. Nothing record breaking, but still way above average. While checking the saoker hose in our raised garden beds today, I noticed a lot of seeds have started to sprout. Both our wild flower and our vegetable seeds are doing extremly well as far as I can tell. I've noticed the sun flowers, peas, corn, lettuce,spinach, lima beans and a few others have broken through the top soil to see the sun!

I hope to have some images to share with you in a day or so.

Video of our raised garden beds in Arizona - October 2010

A couple images of our newly planted raised gardens

I plan on taking better pictures and some video of our raised garden beds, however this is all I have at this time. We used some paint sticks to label our seed rows for fun and because we had so many left over from our interior house painting project.

This our smaller raised garden bed, it is half the size of our second raised garden bed. Notice the newly added metal stakes on the outside of the raised bed, they are 36" concrete stakes that have six or seven holes pre-drilled into them which made it great for driving screws into the raised bed frame. Without these large metal stakes the bed would surely bow out and eventually break open!

This our larger raised garden bed which is 10' x 3' x 18". Here you can see the paint stir sticks used as plant and seed markers for the time being.

Raised garden beds now have seeds and small plants planted!

It's almost hard to believe that we now have something in our raised garden beds. I built both raised garden beds a few months back and have waiting unpaintenly to  plant anything in them  for soooo long! Now that the harsh Arizona summer weather has moved along, we can actually go outside and work in our new raised garden beds. Here are some photos depicting as best I can, how we layered our garden bed soil and what went into the mix and why.

A quick reminder of the size of our raised garden beds:Raised bed #1 is 10' x 3' x 18"
Raised bed #2 is 20' x 3' x 18"

First thing we did was to add close to 1"-2" of newspaper along the bottom of the raised bed for a carbon source.

Next we added some alfalfa hay to the raised garden bed. For this 10' x 3' raised bed we used about half a bale of alfalfa hay to cover the newspaper.

After adding the alfalfa hay, we added a few good shovel scoops of our very own compost! We were excited to use this compost since we started  our own compost pile some time ago in preparation for our raised garden beds.

Then it was time to add the worms! We added about 40 Canadian nightcrawlers to each raised garden bed to help work the soil for us as well as give us those great worm castings the plants love. We should be able to keep this raised garden bed soil moist enough to have these Canadian nightcrawlers live for and reproduce for years and years.

After adding our garden soil mix to fill in the raised beds and cover our worms, we added some bone meal and blood meal for a nice organic fertilizer boost. We mixed the bone and blood meal into the top 3"-4" of our raised beds with a metal rake.

The final step in adding the soil to our raised garden beds was to give it good soaking with the garden hose. Although we were spraying the garden bed with the garden hose after each layer of mix, it's a good idea to really wet it down after the layer is completed. This help the soil mix settle and let's you see any low spots you may need to level out.

Next thing on the list was to install our soaker hose that will water our raised garden beds evenly. This was done the following day since adding the soil to the garden beds took a while to do...it's not that I'm lazy, but see how long it takes you to shovel 10,000 lbs of soil mix into a wheelbarrow then shovel it into a raised garden bed, lol!!!!!!!!

We will be starting our raised gardens this coming week!

Many people claim that you should have your raised garden beds going by now, however we waited for our extreme Arizona heat to pass. If you've been keeping track on our Arizona weather you will know that we have been setting new record heat temp.'s for quite some time. If Arizona didn't  break a heat record, we tied it or came within a few degrees! This summer has been a very HOT summer without much relief. With this in mind, we decieded to hold off on planting anything in our raised garden beds until the heat broke; next week should be the time to plant.

Here is what I'm going to do with our raised gardn beds as far as the soil:
(I have two raised garden beds about 10' x 4' x 18")

The bottom of the raised garden bed will be covered in 1"-2" of newspaper.
Next layer will be a few inches of alfalfa hay.
I will be adding about 1' of natural soil on top of this with a bunch of earthworms and kitchen scraps mixed in.
After this I will be adding our entire compost pile that we have been building up for a few months.
To top off our raised garden beds I will be filling the rest of the bed with "garden soil" from a local rock supply yard.
(Depending on what is in the "garden soil" from the rock supply yard,  I may be adding in bone meal and blood meal.)

I believe this combination will provide us with great tasting produce. Please comment if you have any suggestions :)

Our second raised garden

While waiting to complete the new valve installation I decided to build another raised garden bed on the other side of the yard. This garden is half as big as the first one, only 10' x 3', a perfect size for our location.

As with the first garden we built, we wrapped the pine 1" x 6" boards with 6 mil black plastic. This should also help us during the winter to warm our soil just a little.

The plants behind the garden are star jasmine which should do fine even with a little extra water now and then. They smell great and look really nice once established. It is hard to see it in the photo, but we have attached green tree wire to the wall for a home made trellis. It will do double duty when the taller veggies arrive :)

The plan is to use one eight head drip emitter that will feed all the water through a few soaker tubes snaked through the crops. Changes will follow with growth habits...