it's a beautiful day in the middle of March and it's time to plant the second
plot in our new dream garden here on a previous video we showed you how we
plant potatoes and we did that in the first subplot and now in this second
subplot here we're going to plant squash and cucumbers now one of the major
points of emphasis of having this new dream garden was because it was going to
allow us to rotate our crops better we could plant certain families of plants
in each subplot there and it's going to allow us to rotate them around better
have a more broad crop rotation and in the end help reduce our pests and
diseases that we have year of a year so we try to plant crops that are in the
same family in the same subplot here and so in this subplot we're planting summer
squash and we're playing cucumbers now when it comes to planting cucurbits like
squash or cucumbers or even watermelons we have to remember that fungal diseases
can always be a problem things like powdery mildew and downy
mildew now those diseases don't always give us
problems in early spring but as we move into the warmer months in the early
summer and the humidity increases especially down here in South Georgia
those fungal diseases can be a real big problem now one thing that's going to
feed those diseases it's leaf moisture so if we can reduce the amount of leaf
moisture we have we're going to be a lot more successful in battling those
diseases like powdery mildew and downy mildew now we have certain spray
treatments that we can use to try to treat those diseases things like liquid
copper and like our complete disease control well the number one thing we can
do to reduce the powdery mildew and the downy mildew is use drip irrigation drip
irrigation is going to put the water there at the plant roots not on the
leaves so it's going to reduce that leaf moisture it's going to feed that plant
better and in the end we're going to have less diseases healthier plants and
hopefully more bountiful harvests so the first thing to do before planting the
second subplot and my new dream garden here was to mark off our rows and lay
our drip irrigation now these subplots are thirty by thirty
five so they're 35 foot wide and that worked
out perfect for me to have six rows which are five feet apart so I'm going
to plant two rows of cucumbers and then four rows of summer squash to lay off
our rows and put down our drip irrigation we use our tried-and-true fad
system and fad stands for furrow amend and drip so we take the double wheel hoe
with the plow set and we make us a furrow there a straight line where our
row is going to be then we take some of our good compost it's got some chicken
manure and peanut hulls in it and we kind of lightly sprinkle that into that
furrow and then we take our drip tape layer attachment come along there and
lay the drip tape in the furrow and that's going to cover it at the same
time so we have drip tape buried there with compost below it that's going to
give those plants plenty of nutrients I went with a five-foot row spacing
because in the past I've been bad about planting my squash rows to close
together and it just kind of becomes a jungle and I'm not able to get in there
easily and harvest everything without damaging or stepping on the plant so I
went with a five-foot row spacing here on my squash plant so that'll make it
easier to get in there and harvest everything and give me plenty of space
and room to work so for any kind of plant that needs trellising whether it
be cucumbers pole beans or running butter beans we like to use these
galvanized cattle panels here you can get these things at your local tractor
supply or hardware store for about 25 bucks they're 16 foot long and they last
forever we use t-posts to support these cattle panels we put one on the end one
in the middle and so that worked out to be five t posts for this 30-foot row
right here and I used to use those little metal clips to attach the cattle
panel to the T post but those things are kind of time-consuming so I started
using zip ties and they work out so much better now one more note about these
cattle panels and trellis and cucumbers I always like to plant my cucumbers on
the edge of my sub plots the cucumber's will crawl up this trellis really nice
but they'll also sprawl along the ground a little
bit and if you plant them in the middle of a subplot they're going to end up
crawling all over your other plants so we like to put them on the ends of the
garden so they can crawl out into the open space and we can even trim those
vines with the lawnmower if we need to so here in this subplot I put my two
trellises on both ends to kind of book end the subplot now let's talk about what
we're planting so here we have four rows for summer squash and we have two rows
for cucumbers so we're going to plant five varieties or five packets of summer
squash and two varieties or two packets of cucumbers so the first one of summer
squash we're going to plant is this variety here called goldprize which is
a nice hybrid variety of straight neck squash that we've grown before and we
really like and then we're going to grow two varieties of patty-pan squash and
the first one here is a variety called sunburst which is a yellow patty-pan
squash with a little green circle in the middle and this is an all-american
selections winter it's been a proven squash variety for us over the years and
we really like it and then the other patty-pan we're going is this old
heirloom variety called benning's green tint squash which kind of has a lime
green color to it and it's really nice as well then as far as zucchini goes
we've got two varieties of zucchini here we've got this green variety here called
spineless beauty which is a great producer and this other one here which
is probably one of my favorite zucchini varieties this yellow zucchini called
golden delight for the cucumbers I usually like to plant one row of the
pickling cucumbers and one row of the slicing cucumbers and both of our
cucumber varieties that were planting or what they call gynoecious cucumbers
they are hybrid varieties that only produce female flowers and the female
flower is where the fruit comes from so both of these varieties are extremely
productive and if you've never grown any hybrid gotta eat just cucumbers you're
in for a treat definitely give them a try and they will blow your mind how
many cucumbers they produce so the pickling variety we're going is
calypso and then the slicing variety we're growing is called Stonewall so as
far as the in row spacing on the squash goes we're going to let the drip tape do
the work for us so I hooked up my filter regulator combo hooked up my row starts
on the drip tape plugged my ends with my drip tape row ends and then turn my
water on and that drip tape has emitters located every 12 inches along the tape
and so what I'll do is I'll just let that water run for 15 20 minutes or so
and you'll start to see that wet spot on top of each one of those emitters and
I'll just poke a seed down there in the soil and cover it up on top of each one
of those emitters located every foot along that tape now I realize that one
foot spacing is obviously too close for squash but planting one every foot on
every emitter there ensures I'll get a good stand and once the plants come up
I'll come in there and thin every one and usually go with a two foot spacing
so the plants can grow out well on the cucumbers I usually won't end those
because they're gonna be growing vertically they don't need as much space
beside each plant so I'll leave those at a 1 foot spacing so I'm going to go
ahead and get started poking these squash and cucumbers seeds in the ground
and we will see you guys on the next video