The rain

The rain hit us really hard right at 10pm! Currently it's bright blue skies outside and cold. I was hoping the rain would continue into today, but it seems like all the fun rain comes at night when were asleep :(

The garden and the entire yard for that matter got a good soaking, which means I shouldn't have to run my drip irrigation for the next couple of weeks if we stay under the 80 degree mark.

Frozen bird bath image

Picture of the frozen bird bath. Taken during the first week of January 2011.

The rain from Cali is here

Looks like the rain is here tonight. It started raing hard a few hours back, but is now it is calm. I recently sold my two rain barrel set up and am now wishing I had more :) All is not lost, however, I was able to collect six 5 gallon buckets full of rain water! I have installed another section of rain gutter and was able to use the down spout from that section of gutter to fill the buckets.

Rain barrel update: Finished phase one of three

Rain barrel update:

I have finished installation of the rain gutter in location number one out of our three total locations. The gutter is hung, the down spout has been installed and the rain barrels have been placed in the proper location. I have my flexible hose attached to the gutter down spout and connected to the atrium gate which is installed upside down on top of the rain barrel  lid. I have taken some  pictures, but need to download them from my camera later to post here.

We may get some rain today as a matter of fact. Local reports are calling for later in the evening rain which will give my new rain gutters a good test run for larger storms in the future. I am excited to see the results of our rain collection device.

I will post the images soon as well as a detailed list of what is needed to accomplish what I have done here. It's really very simple and should be very rewarding!

How to make rain barrels using food grade 55 gallon barrels

So I decided adding a few rain barrels would be a great way to reduce our use of water we have to pay for. I'll be doing this process from start to finish all the while adding pictures of the progress along with posts on idea's and such.

I am very excited to start this rain barrel project and anxious to see how much water we can collect from our Arizona rain storms.

Here is an image of my rain barrels. So far I have two, but I plan on adding a few more  in the near future. My rain barrels are food grade, 55 gallon blue plastic barrels with removable lids that secure to the top of the barrel with a metal clamp.

REMEBER:
- Always use a FOOD GRADE barrel so that you do not contaminate your rain water with chemicals that were once inside the plastic barrel.

- Removable lids are a MUST in order to clean your rain barrel properly.

I look forward to posting more progress soon. You might have rain gutters installed on your residence, I however do not. After I find the perfect place to put the rain barrel, I will have to install rain gutters on the roof. This should not be very hard, although I've never installed rain gutters before. Time consuming at the least is all.

Soaker hose

We have decieded to install soaker hose in our raised bed garden and see how well it works compared to standard drip line and drip emitters. One thing I did was use about a 8" piece of drip line tube to connect the soaker hose to our eight head emitter. This will allow the water to flow through the standard drip line and into the soak er that is in the soil. If I were to hook up the soaker hose right into the eight head emitter, I would have water leaking from the soaker hose where I don't want or need it. The pictures should explain what I mean better:

Here is the soaker hose and a few bags of metal stakes to hold the soaker hose in the soil. The soaker hose allows water to seep through itself thus slowly watering the plants around it.

Here is my eight head emitter that is attachted to our main water suplly line. I connected roughly an 8" piece of 1/8" drip line tube to the emitter and used  an elbow to attatch the drip line to the soaker hose. This allows me to use  a metal stake to secure the soaker hose at the top of our garden soil and also lets me keep the water off the wall and the top of our raised garden frame. Sure we get rain from time to time so it's not a huge deal if water drips onto the wall or frame of our raised garden, but to me it just looks more clean and I don't want to waste any water by watering a wall :)

Planting some more cactus in the morning!

I plan on planting more cactus in the morning along a wall that gets a lot of sun. I plan on planting a few of what I now know are called "pinecone cactus". They are thos gray looking cactus that get a beautiful white flower. I'll post some photos after I get them in the ground to show you, however I did take a picture of one or two mixed in with other cactus cuttings a while back if you wanted to look there.

Also, I will be making a repair to a drip line that I punched a hole through while extending my citrus tree drip lines. I noticed a large river of water had made a groove into the new steer manure mulch I added last weekend, so tomorrow I will have to explore a little and find out where and how I did that. I'm thinking I poked a hole in the smaller drip line while trying to install the drip line stakes I needed to keep the emitters at the right place without ever moving...we'll soon see :)

New thought today...make a mini pond!

Had the nice idea today to build a mini pond or container pond for the yard! I'm thinking of one for the yard, in ground, and another for the patio that would be made out of plat containers with a pump.

Still looking for the right place in the yard. Would be nice to have some ater and shelter for a toad :)

Enjoy the weekend!!!

Let's build our garden bed

OK let's get started!

It's early in June, 2010, Location is somewhere near Phoenix, Arizona. The temperature is around 105 or so. The idea of building a raised garden sprouted in our heads as our family searches for an escape from over processed and chemical filled foods. With disease and sickness part of everyday life, it only made sense to start with the food we eat. This starts our adventure to live healthier, more fulfilling lives.

Our Arizona garden project begins by building a raised garden be approx. 20' x 3' x 12". It started out being two stacked 1" x 6" pine boards, wrapped in a protective 6 mil black plastic to keep the chemicals in the wood from leaching out into the soil. We soon added another 1" x 6" pine board to make the overall height approx. 18" high with 2" or so buried in the ground. We read that this would be the optimal height for growing most everything here in the desert.

Here are a few photos from the building phase of the raised garden bed:

(This took two of us about half of a really warm Saturday)

We used three 4" x 4" x 5' posts to support our raised garden bed. We buried these approx. 12" deep seeing that this would be deep enough for support while allowing us a little break from having to dip down really deep in this hard compacted Arizona dirt. The wood we used for the border was 1" x 6" x 10' pine. Along the wall we covered 1/2" plywood with the same 6 mil plastic to help keep any water run off from sneaking through and/or under the wall.

We added a lattice at the entrance of the garden to help support a few cape honey suckle plants - extra shade is always nice in the hot summer :) The plan is to irrigate this raised bed with a drip system running along the back.