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Re: The Garden

By: Decomposed in POPE 5 | Recommend this post (0)
Sun, 06 Oct 19 3:40 PM | 66 view(s)
Boardmark this board | Pope 5 		Msg. 41600 of 62138
(This msg. is a reply to 41076 by Decomposed)
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Re: "I've laid out three 2,000 square foot plastic strips..."The problem with my plastic sheeting is one of holding it in place. If the wind gets beneath it, it has some serious lift.

The first test of this came on Friday. 15 mph winds were predicted, so I went out ahead of time and put wood pallets down on all the corners, laid some stones around the perimeter, and even parked the tractor across two of the sheets.

Friday morning, it didn't look too bad. By noon, the wind was beginning to whip. By 2 p.m., my wife saw that a corner of one of the strips had pulled loose from a pallet. I went out and fixed it, then saw that with every new gust, bubbles three feet high and ten feet across were forming in the sheets and running across them like things alive. Every time the bubbles reached the end of a sheet, they'd toss my 2 and 3 pound stones away like pebbles.

I spent two hours adding more and more to the plastic. By the time I was done, the wind was dying down and the plastic was being held - BARELY - by fourteen pallets, three panels of a TREX compost box, numerous lengthy boards, seven small boards on which I'd placed cinder blocks, several heavy floorboards (plywood-like sheets of pressed wood), as many stones as I could find and, of course, my tractor.

That was only 15 mph wind. It seems I've got a problem.

The issue is that no matter how many things I put on the edges, there are always gaps. Wind is able to get into them and inflate the sheets like balloons - at which point there's no quantity of weight that will hold them down. If the gusts had been two or three times what they were on Friday, I'd have lost those things! Obviously, I'm going to have to seal the edges somehow so that no air can get beneath them. A few hundred pounds of glue might do the trick - lol. Dirt from the forest is probably my best bet. The plastic only has 720 feet of edge... shouldn't take long, right? Heh. I'll need a lot of dirt. This is going to be a royal pain. At least the ground in the forest isn't frozen. I can still dig it up.




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Gold is $1,581/oz today. When it hits $2,000, it will be up 26.5%. Let's see how long that takes. - De 3/11/2013 - ANSWER: 7 Years, 5 Months


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The above is a reply to the following message:
Re: The Garden
By: Decomposed in POPE 5
Tue, 01 Oct 19 12:33 AM 		Msg. 41076 of 62138

This year's garden was a measly 13' x 30' -- 390 square feet total. But 90 square feet of it was aisle, so it really was small. I did my best to compensate by crowding the plants... which turned it into a jungle and may have actually decreased production.

Next year, I'm taking a different approach. I've laid out three 2,000 square foot plastic strips (They don't look it, but each is 20' x 100') with 4' aisles, for a total garden plot of 6,800 square feet. That's about 17½ times what I had this year... and the old plot will get used again too. That should keep me busy.

It will probably be a few years before the soil in the new plot will be any good. It's been getting hayed for as long as I've owned it (15 years) - and probably for fifty years before that. I'm sure the nutrients have all been sucked out, so I'll add a lot of compost and fertilizer. Nothing new there. I had to build up the old garden plot as well.

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