Alright!
John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com with this huge giant zucchini!
So let’s see.
This guy, he’s probably still going to be good eating, we got to pick it really soon.
Here’s one that’s even better eating.
But today on this episode we are going to talk about hoops!
So I don’t mean hula hoops, I mean gardening hoops.
So you can see here we have a garden hoop, and if you go to a garden center you’ll
probably find hoop kits, and they can be very expensive actually.
So actually what these are is just basic PVC pipe, half inch PVC pipe, so I get the thick
wall PVC pipe, and you basically just make two mounts for them, and you bend them into
place.
So you can see the hoops here actually have the shade cloth on them because we have some
new transplants that we just planted, let me give you a shot of that down there.
[inaudible] for a row cover we’re going to take it off pretty soon, as soon as they
get well-established.
Here’s more, my crazy melon trellis is a hoop and then we put these PVC connectors
on.
So basically all you do is you just get the PVC and you get two mounting clips, let me
see if I can show you a mounting clip.
We got these electrical conduit mounting clips right here, as you can see.
They’re right down right here, and we put those on the inside of the wood to secure
it, and basically just put one end of the PVC there, and then go to the other side and
mount it there and then just bend it, it will bend in place and it won’t break.
And it’ll bend quite easily, and it’ll be fine.
The other thing I saw that one of the nurseries is doing locally is instead of mounting on
the inside like I did, you can mount it on the outside, for aesthetic reasons I want
to mount on the inside.
If you did mount it on the outside what you would do is you’d get a larger sized pole,
maybe even a metal pole, and secure it to the outside of your bed on both sides, and
then basically you would stick the PVC tube down into it, and then bend it over and then
put it into the tube that’s on the other side.
So that’s the PVC hoops, many things you could do with them.
On this one actually we have the hoops, and we put the shade cloth on, in the winter time
we will put the clear plastic on and we could put just a white row cover.
On this one actually we attached nylon string trellis to, it’s almost entirely hidden
now by my crazy melon trellis, all the melon vines are growing, but here’s the nylon
string, we actually secured it with the zip ties.
So let’s see, it’s holding pretty good, it’s not getting too heavy up top, but let
me see if I can find a mel – [inaudible] there’s a melon growing, alright!
There’s a melon growing, hopefully you can see that on the camera.
But yeah, so definitely inexpensive use for creating hoops out of the PVC, I mean 10 foot
section might run two dollars.
I’d recommend buying the 20 foot sections, they’re usually a little bit better deal,
and they’re a little bit longer, so if you need to make three cuts, like my PVC pipes
are cut about six feet, 6.66 feet, so actually I got three pieces out of a 20 footer, but
if I bought the 10 footers I’d probably only be able to get one section and have four
foot sections of scrap or leftover actually.
So another question I got recently was weeds, “John, what do you do about weeds?”
So you can take a look while I walk around in my beds, and you will not see too many
weeds.
And this is for a couple of reasons, number one is because all the soil I used was compost,
and the compost basically was composted so when they compost it, it heats it up.
And when it heats up to certain degrees for a specific amount of time, it deactivates
all the weed seeds.
So thus there’s no weed seeds in my soil that I started with.
So there’s none, when I started with there’s no weeds that are going to grow up, the only
way weed seeds are going to get in is if they blow in, birds drop poop and drop seeds, or
whatever.
So I don’t really have a problem with weeds because I raised up my soil level and I filled
it all with compost which basically didn’t have any active weed seeds in there.
And once again the compost is loose and fluffy, which is a benefit to the new plants so the
roots can easily go down and root through it.
And it’s a benefit when pulling weeds, because the soil’s not hard and impacted.
If you go down to where my real ground is, here’s some crabgrass right here actually,
and my real ground right here I mean, this stuff is Adobe clay, so pulling weeds or even
grass out of Adobe clay is really difficult.
So that’s another reason for the raised beds is the ease of pulling weeds.
So I think that’ll do it with this episode, this is John Kohler with growingyourgreens.com,
talking about hoops and weeds.
Alright, remember, you can grow your own greens!