Continuation of an odyssey

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Pv2 said:
my experience at a higher altitude and slightly more rainfall about 50 miles east is you will be watering 2ce per day or installing a drip line. you may even need shade, but possibly not. is that a west facing wall? if so yes on the shade if it doesn't happen from other structures.

otherwise that is pretty cool, if you get tired of gardening you possibly have a buyer for it nearby. :wink:
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It's actually the East wall. Or close enough. We are fairly high here... Not quite as high as you are, but we are in the Santa Rita foothills, at 3300' so more than a thousand feet higher than Tucson and we get about two inches more rain in a season as well. It's always about three degrees colder here too than the airport, which is good.

But yeah, the plants on the West wall have been tapped into the drip irrigation but putting in the pool and drainage caused us to have to rip out the East side irrigation. I will eventually rig something from that side (the controller is on the East side but the water source and valve is on the West side... Totally bizarre, I know) but so far a couple gallons of water twice a day is what is going to happen. I will have to look up the tomato issues. They like hot and humid, those seasons were always the best in the Midwest, the dryness concerns me here... I will have to see about calcium.
 
put your old eggshells on them, or bonemeal (or old bones) even a dose of miracle grow will usually solve it. the other thing is fairly consistant soil moisture. have you seen these things? Amazon.com: Ogrmar Set of 4 Plant Waterer Self Watering Terracotta Spikes Automatically Water Your Indoor and Outdoor Plants While On Vacation (4, Dia: 4.8cm): Garden & Outdoor
I haven't tried them outside in summer yet but they helped the houseplants survive my lackadaisical winter watering habits. it is an old technology and I am keeping my eye out for some real unglazed small mouth pottery jugs now.
 
I grow my tomatoes in grow boxes. You fill the bottom with water and they water from the bottom up.
0BBDC7B8-2C88-4EE9-A762-2A34D65459D1.jpeg

The soil here sucks, so these work great until I get around to building raised garden beds. I fertilize with Dolomite (lime) to sweeten the soil, and fertilize with miracle grow weekly.

If interested, you can buy the boxes Here.
 
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Pv2 said:
put your old eggshells on them, or bonemeal (or old bones) even a dose of miracle grow will usually solve it. the other thing is fairly consistant soil moisture. have you seen these things? Amazon.com: Ogrmar Set of 4 Plant Waterer Self Watering Terracotta Spikes Automatically Water Your Indoor and Outdoor Plants While On Vacation (4, Dia: 4.8cm): Garden & Outdoor
I haven't tried them outside in summer yet but they helped the houseplants survive my lackadaisical winter watering habits. it is an old technology and I am keeping my eye out for some real unglazed small mouth pottery jugs now.
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I've seen people use those before and I understand that they work. That's an interesting idea to have anyway in case we have to go away for a day or two. Ultimately I need to run a drip line to the setup, but that's going to have to be a few weekends from now. With the Jackhammer it should be a lot easier than it was to run the other line which I did with a pickaxe, but I will have to tap the silcox that is also the autofill line for the pool, so there is some work involved there. I could go "ghetto" on this though and just run a valve and a timer to the hose line and do a "temporary" setup. That's an interesting idea... Especially if we decide we have to move it somewhere else.

I read a good way to get calcium to the tomatoes (and cucumbers and peppers... my wife picked all plants in that family!) is to water with powdered milk mixed in. Anyone try that? It's interesting. This means I can also probably literally pour milk when it gets old on them watered down a bit....
 
Arizonarob said:
I grow my tomatoes in grow boxes. You fill the bottom with water and they water from the bottom up.
View attachment 136880

The soil here sucks, so these work great until I get around to building raised garden beds. I fertilize with Dolomite (lime) to sweeten the soil, and fertilize with miracle grow weekly.

If interested, you can buy the boxes Here.
Click to expand...

What's your address again Rob - @Arizonarob ? I need to go on a midnight resupply run. :poke:
 
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I have stupidly told my wife that it's now or never in planting some plants in the back yard. So I did not get the salt cell in today. I dug holes with the jackhammer and did a bunch of work on the irrigation and I think I got volunteered to install a water softener at a neighbors house tomorrow as well.

I will be done with this someday. I will.

Have I said digging a hole here is a real $&#%$? Man I am sore and I am about a third of the way done only.

I will post some pictures of the flowers mañana.
 
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Rattus Suffocatus said:
I will be done with this someday. I will
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...... well you did say you wanted to use up most of your leftover chlorine. Keep up the great work. It takes lots of self control to stick to your guns like that when there is a shiny new toy sitting there.
 
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Rattus Suffocatus said:
I have stupidly told my wife that it's now or never in planting some plants in the back yard. So I did not get the salt cell in today. I dug holes with the jackhammer and did a bunch of work on the irrigation and I think I got volunteered to install a water softener at a neighbors house tomorrow as well.

I will be done with this someday. I will.

Have I said digging a hole here is a real $&#%$? Man I am sore and I am about a third of the way done only.

I will post some pictures of the flowers mañana.
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playing catch-up reading the post,didn’t you hand her the cell and tell her to install it while you dig?
Looks good
 
Yeah, that and the fact that I still have seven gallons of liquid chlorine... It's supposed to storm tomorrow too so it might not happen. I have one more plant to get into the ground (three of them were "mine") tomorrow and it should take me minutes to put the cell in and set up everything... So "soon" on that. I did help the neighbor put in a water softener today so it was productive over all and we did desperately need plants planted in that back yard.

I need to clean up the dirt a bit from the holes but after I do that I will post pictures of course.

This was my "mother's day" gift to her...

But man, digging a hole here....

For now, stolen from my wife's Facebook... Screenshot_20200509-214830.png
 
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Well, this is rather anti-climactic. Finally hooked up the Circupool Universal 40 and turned it on and it just works. The display is dead on for instantaneous salt reading with the K-1766 and the temperature reading is spot on. So I now officially have a "salt pool". We will keep track of it all the next few days and diddle with the timer and percentage (digitally displayed at 63%, though the knob is analog) over the long weekend. IMG_20200517_161640329_HDR.jpg
IMG_20200517_161059065_HDR.jpgIMG_20200517_161113060_HDR.jpgIMG_20200517_161632399_HDR.jpg
 
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By the way, assuming the pool math calculation for CYA and salt is correct, I am finding that my pool may very well be closer to 15k gallons rather than 13k gallons which we measured with the water meter when filling. It rained fairly hard the night we filled it, probably a quarter inch. Now does that translate into a 1000 gallons of water? Dunno...
 
Rattus Suffocatus said:
Well, this is rather anti-climactic.
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This is EXACTLY the draw to SWG for most of us. It just does its thing, boringly, in the background so you can do anything else you have to do. Its highly advisable to keep tabs on it weekly, but if you need to take a 3 week trip, it'll probably be fine.
 
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