Well, with the exception of some flower seeds, but everything else is in as of yesterday afternoon.  I transplanted the pea & bean sprouts I had going in the window, although I think I broke the stem of one of the pea plants.  If it doesn’t recover I’ll just put a sugar snap in its place.  Hopefully though, these most recent transplants do alright.  There isn’t too much of a difference between the temperature indoors on the windowsill compared to outside right now, except they were sitting behind a high-UV blocking screen and now they have full-blast UV from the sun.  I’ll check them later when I get home to see how they did.

I did acclimate them a little bit, I placed them outside for a few hours on Saturday but since they were in peat pots the soil dried out pretty quickly so they were a bit wilted when I brought them back into the house, but they perked up after being watered. 

I also re-did my drip hose.  I had first fashioned two of them out of a 50′ length of rubber drip hose but those didn’t cover well enough, so I bought a 75′ length of a different type of drip hose and have it snaked across the gap between the two beds so I wouldn’t have to cut it.  I put the drip hose through about a 4′ length of swimming pool vacuum hose that we aren’t using anymore to keep the water that would drip from the section over the gap from hitting the ground, and propped that up over some taller buckets so the water trickles out into either ofthe two beds.  Not a pretty set up, but it works and the coverage is better.  And it doesn’t take long for it to get things properly watered, and whatever it misses, I can hand-water.

I still need to figure out the shade though.  This week it’s nice and in the low to mid 80s, but it will reach the 90s before too long.

So here’s the pickle we’re in; our summers here regularly surpass 110 degrees, but I’d say we probably average around 108 or so until September at best.  We’re often running our air conditioning well into October, when suddenly the weather will snap and for a time we’ll need neither a/c nor heat.

But the problem for my Square Foot Garden is going to be the blistering summer sun.  Vegetable plants like a lot of sun, but to be frank, they will roast here.  I think I’d like to save the veggie roasting for when we’re about to eat them, thanks!  If we’re not careful I half expect to find popcorn laying about the yard and the ears of our corn bare to the cobs! LOL

So, we will need to build some sort of shade structure to protect our garden.  We currently have only two, 4’x4′ boxes, and they are arranged about three feet apart, in a north/south direction.

At first I thought, build one big rectangular shade; not only would it shade the veggies, but it would shade us as we go about our business of tending and harvesting in the garden.I was envisioning something about seven to eight feet wide, and about twelve to fifteen feet long.  However, a couple of factors are putting a dent in that idea.

One, we get some awful winds here sometimes – like last night… currently we have tarps covering the soil in the raised beds until we get stuff planted, and we were constantly checking on them and adding river rock to hold the tarps down.  So, the bigger the structure, the more damage there could potentially be if it were to fly away in a wind storm.  I picture it landing in a neighbor’s yard, in pieces.

Two, costs.  So far, to get a large piece of shade cloth to cover both the gardens and provide a little extra shade on the sides, is going to cost right around $100 – JUST for the cloth (because it would have to be a custom size).  Ack!

So now I’m wondering if I should just go with an arched design, specifically sized for each bed rather than encompassing both.  But on the flip side of that, it would not provide any shade for US, so working out in the garden would be even worse than if it were shaded.

It’s not going to be a permanent structure (that is, not BOLTED to the ground), but we will probably use rebar and tie lines to keep it in place, unless I just use enough PVC pipe to cross over each individual bed in which case, it would sit inside the box and the sides of the box would hold the PVC in place…

I’m still trying to work out the pros and cons of each and decide whether to fork out the extra $ for a larger structure with potential to make working in the garden more comfortable for us,  or go cheap and end up hating every second we step outside just to retrieve some veggies and make sure the soil has some moisture in it…. *sigh*

Any suggestions out there?  The actual structure itself is either going to be entirely PVC (which is cheap and flexible), or electrcial conduit (stronger, but more expensive as it is priced by the foot), or a combination of both…

I decided to start small and only bought enough wood for two 4’x4′ boxes.  I built those over the course of two days; the first one I did without pre-drilling guide holes for the deck screws, which I do not ever recommend anyone try – it literally gave me a headache by the time I was done.  The second one I had purchased some drill bits (I already had the drill, but it was packaged primarily as a screwdriver so didn’t come with any drill bits) so that I could make the guide holes, which made the process a whole lot faster and easier.  And no headache!

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