Growing Food: Milk Jugs, Finally!

A. and I spent a few hours on Easter preparing the ground for and planting out the kohlrabi and cabbages. FINALLY. 

And that means I can finally show you how we do it. Whee!

A. does the actual digging. He's very speedy with a shovel. 

He uncovered many of these nasty grubs in the course of his digging, which I collected for the chickens.

I also uncovered this toad when I was raking the bed. It startled me quite severely. Luckily, it was uninjured and we found a nice shady spot for it to hide itself away again.

I hoe out the chunks of dirt and rake it, and then A. uses the hoe to form the berms of soil that surround our beds.

The reason we need those berms is that we have to be able to flood these beds. In fact, I flood the beds before I put any plants in. I don't do this for seeds, of course, but for plants with existing roots, I plant them right in mud.

So the first step after preparing the bed is flooding it. I drop the hose in and let it run for about twenty minutes, which is how long it takes for there to be two or three inches of water on the surface. After I remove the hose, I let the water soak in. It takes about fifteen minutes for all the water to sink below the surface.

While I'm doing this, I'm also preparing the milk jugs. These are plastic gallon jugs that I save for about a month in the spring. We go through about four gallons of milk a week, so I don't have any trouble accumulating a good supply of them.

All I do with them is remove the caps and cut off the bottom couple of inches of the jug.

I find a bread knife to be best for this task.

Although I rinse the jugs out when we're finished with them, I don't actually wash them, so this step involves some seriously stinky sour milk. Gross.

The plants don't mind the smell, though.

After I have all my jugs ready and the beds no longer have standing water in them, I dig a hole in the mud for the plant, put it in, and then put a milk jug right over the plant. I press the jug down into the mud about half an inch. When the mud dries, the jug will stick in the soil and won't blow off. Very important here.

A bed of jugs.* Not pretty, but functional.

The jug does many things. It protects the plants from our very drying winds and from too much evaporation after they're watered.

The jugs protect the plants from freezing temperatures as well. The heat from the sun will get trapped in these jugs and even if the temperature gets below freezing, it won't freeze inside the jugs. The small opening at the top allows enough heat to escape that the plants don't get cooked, but they do stay warm. In this way, I can plant cabbages out well before the last frost date.

The opaque plastic of the jugs also protects the plants from too much direct sunlight. In addition, I can water right inside the jug. It will trap the water right where it needs to be.

Yet another benefit of the jugs is they enable me to mulch the plants easily. I can just dump the mulch right in the bed and spread it around the jugs without worrying about covering up the plants.

We don't actually have a lot of soiled hay this year to use for mulch, so I used some leaf and wood chip detritus I raked out of the driveway, mixed with compost from the compost pile, to mulch these beds.

Looks kind of rough, but it'll work.

The mulch is useful for suppressing weeds, but more importantly, it keeps moisture from evaporating so quickly. I'll flood this whole bed every couple of days and the water will sink right down into the ground below the mulch.

Besides those two beds of cabbage and kholrabi, I planted two trenches of green beans. The only things left to plant are the cucurbits (calabaza and cucumbers) and the basil, tomatoes, and peppers that are growing still in the bathroom. Those plants will get jugs, too, but they're still a few weeks from being planted out.

So tell me, my fellow gardeners: Do you use anything to protect your plants when you transplant them?

* I'll explain about those two plants surrounded by rocks in a later post.