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Dale Tate's Garden Site
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Dedicated to the Senior Citizen's Community Gardens sponsored by the City of El Paso's Parks and Recreation Department located at bout 600 yards down an unimproved road toward the Franklin Mountain from the intersection at 9175 Stahala and Gabriel streets in El Paso Texas.
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Southwest Desert Gardening in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado,
California, Nevada, and Utah.|
The Garden Biosphere |
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By Dale Tate
The “Garden Biosphere” as designed and constructed by Dale Tate at the Weldon Yerby Community Gardens located at 9175 Stahala at Gabriel Street in El Paso Texas is a delight for the home or backyard gardener.
A known fact is that the Tomato is the most popular garden plant in the United States. It is estimated (really a guess) that 20,000,000 home gardeners grow tomatoes with some success and if this be true, then there is another 40,000,000 who have tried to grow tomatoes, failed, and given up. The purpose of this document is to show and tell you how it’s done.
First let talk some about the “Tomato Plant” itself. It is actually a tropical sprawling perennial vine grown as an annual in our home gardens. A good history of its origin and development is given by Sam Cox at: http://lamar.colostate.edu/~samcox/Tomato.html . There have been many cultivars or varieties of tomatoes developed by plant breeder for many specific purposes. A tomato is now available as a determinate bush that will produce fruit at one particular time for a primary harvest. Many of these are picked as green/white ripe fruits and shipped, treated with ethylene gas to ripen them in rout, and they still taste like a gourd when we buy them at our supermarkets. Others are harvested by machine for the food processing industry and still others are grown on one stem in greenhouses for out-of-season production.
Most if not all these commercial growing methods with the specific cultivars developed for them will never compare favorably with the indeterminate vine ripe red tomato that we can grow for ourselves in our home gardens.
The objective of the “Garden Biosphere” is to create a growing environment very similar to the one found in the Tomato’s location of origin. You will find that when you grow your plants without environmental stresses that most of your other problem will go away, or else can be treated with a minimum of corrective measures. Personally, I haven’t used chemicals of any kind after the season is under way.
Now let’s see what the “Garden Biosphere” looks like.
What you are looking at is a miniature hoop house made of ½ inch PVC pipe covered with row covers and with ends of (6 mil UV treated) green-house plastic.
Now on the possibility that you have the opinion that I am some kind of “word smith” or professional writer let me tell you the story of how this little thingy come to be.
Sometime in the last century, horticulture text books copyrighted in the late 1940s, I went to school called “Texas Technological College”. It was not one of the “Land Grant Colleges” with an extension service, as TAMU was then and is today. Didn’t even know what a land grant college meant. My wife, Selma, from the Texas Pan-handle knew TAMU and wanted to go there to school, but at the time, women were not allowed. She also ended up at Texas Tech to my great advantage. Selma and I have a daughter Mary Beth who is a BIO Engineer from TAMU. Times do change.
After a war, graduation from Texas Tech University, raising a family, building a few parks, and retirement, I finally got back to my garden. Along about 1980 someone developed the internet and others started selling computers giving us access to the knowledge posted on www sites by all of these State Land Grant Universities.
My experience:
FIRST YEAR: TAMU had someone who could grow tomatoes; at least they had written and posted some how to do articles on the internet. One of these showed one how to build a tomato cage out of 6 X 6 inch - 10 gage concrete reinforcing wire mesh and covering it with something called “Grow Web”. Finally got a phone number and ordered a 300 foot roll of this “Grow Web” stuff. Set out my tomato plants in wall-o-waters, just like they said.
Constructed those tomato cages four feet six inches high, using the last six inches of the five foot wide concrete mesh to push in the ground, just like they said, and then pinning the “Grow Web” to the tomato cages with cloth pins, just like they said.
Now along about Easter, as is normal for El Paso, the wind gets up a little, to between 60 and 70 miles per hour. Had to gather up my tomato cages from about 90 miles east, down about Van Horn way, and those clothespins, don’t really know what happened to them, there were sightings of them from as far away as Abilene. It was easy to see that pushing six inches of the reinforcing into the ground just was not going to work so I made three stakes of 3/8 inch X 18 inch reinforcing bar for each cage, each with a two inch hook on the end, and drove them in the soil with the hook over the first ring of the cages. This worked pretty well – the next wind just blew the cages over at about a 45º angle. I am a very determined man so the next enhancement was to use a ¼ inch nylon rope guyed on the west and up over the cages to a guy on the east side.
This worked and my tomato plants begin to grow, boy did the grow, in fact by the middle of June the cages were so crowded that there was no way that I could get the grow web pined back on after I had removed it, which I had learned to secure by rolling the ends of the “grow web” together and using a 2 inch ACCO Binder Clip from an “Office Supply” store. Only lost two of my six plants to the “Curly Top Virus” late in the season after to “Grow Web” was removed.
SECOND YEAR: I knew that the tomato was a sprawling perennial vine in its native habitat so surmised that the Texas Aggie were just growing runts or maybe growing some kind of dwarfs or possible not feeding their plants because those tomato cages of theirs were just not going to contain the type of tomatoes that I wanted to grow. I conceived of a hoop cage made of ½” X 10’ PVC pipe using an 18 inch X ½ inch reinforcing bar stake on each side of my 5.5 foot garden bed, leaving about six inches of the bar exposed above ground over which I slipped the end of the ½“ PVC pipe. Placed these hoops about four feet apart and wired a couple of mid ribs to the hoops with bailing wire, then covered my whole 42 foot long garden bed with the “Grow Web”. I even had my good wife sew a two inch loop at the bottom of each side of the “Grow Web” in which I placed a ½ inch iron rebar to hold the cover down.
Needed to do something with those wire cages so I unrolled, flatting them out and laid them on the ground and then raising them off the ground by placing a number of 1 gallon coffee cans under them, thus making a raised plat-form for my tomato plants to sprawl. This kept my tomatoes from rotting on contact with the soil. As it turned out this is the only thing that worked as I had planned.
The first thing that happened was the hoops slipping down over my rebar stakes, then the mid-ribs that I had tried to wire to the hoops just kept slipping around until all I had was a warped contraption, but what really provided a learning experience was the first 70 mile wind storm. The following morning all forty two feet of my “grow web” was shredded and the two 20 foot long ½ inch rebar that had been inserted in the loop on the west side of my garden was on the east side. I still don’t know the physics of how the wind blew these forty feet of iron up and over the hoops, but I’m sure of one more thing that won’t work. Well the 300 feet roll of “grow web” was being used, and without any more loop being sowed on the side, my seamstress went on a strike.
Put the “Grow Web” on three or four times using various methods of attaching it to the hoops. I learned I didn’t know how to build a hoop house but did grow about 600 pounds of tomatoes. Someone ask if I knew how to grow a fall crop of tomatoes. I know one can make tip cutting for a fall crop, but man, I’m tired of tomatoes with them running out my ears and was not interested. Anyhow all but one of my vines were still alive and would start putting on a new crop when the whether cooled which they did.
THIRD YEAR: Learning that I needed more knowledge of tomato cages from the past years experience, kept searching for “tomato cage” with the “Google Search Engine” on my computer and turning up variations of the same wire cages. Just about give up when I decided what I really needed was a “hoop house” and put that to a “Google Search” and found Travis Saling’s Web Site: http://www.westsidegardener.com/howto/hoophouse.html Travis didn’t know much about growing tomatoes in the southwestern deserts, but he did know something about a PVC hoop house which I’ve adapted for my own purpose. First, Travis was building a 10’ X 21’ foot house and my garden beds were only 5.5 foot wide and as I’m about to run out of that 300 foot roll of “grow web” so I opted for a hoop house only 8 foot long X 5.5 feet wide. This was to minimize my loss in that maybe the wind would blow only one of my houses in at any one time.
I put up four houses using my left over “grow web” for the top cover and builder’s 4 mil plastic for the ends. O.K. the ends lasted about until the middle of June, so it took some time and money to replace them and also I lost a lot of fruit to sun scald when all the “grow web” come from together. I had stored it in a metal storage building for about three years now and no one had told me that heat deteriorated the fabric. I thought it was only the sun. Another learning experience – my “grow web” had decomposed from the heat in the barn. By now, I’m really getting frustrated because nobody seems to have any experience in what I’m trying to do. Finally got thru this third year, growing about the same amount of tomatoes and learning a couple of other things like the right way to store row covers, which I’d found out my so called “grow web” was and a very light weight one at that, only .5 oz per sq yard, and to use 6 mil UV treated greenhouse plastic for my ends.
FOURTH YEAR: Hey, I’ve still got a lot to learn, so back to my computer and to the access of knowledge provided by the internet. The first knowledge uncovered was that there are at least two major manufactures of row covers and possible twenty five or more resellers peddling the stuff under there own brand. The two makers of row covers, known to me, are DeWitt. http://www.dewittcompany.com/ , and Ken-Bar. http://www.ken-bar.com/custom.html .Both will tell you the weight of the material; however nobody seems to know the amount of UV treating materials, a fire retardant chemical, used at the time of processing, which seem to me, would indicate the durability of the material, or at least they won’t tell me, and evidentially have not told anyone doing agriculture research because there is no specification that I can find. Row covers are UV Treated Spun Bonded Polyester, UV Treated Spun Bonded Polypropylene, and perhaps some other materials that are unknown to me. These materials are available in different weights that determine the amount of light transmission and strength. All allow water and air to pass and are mechanical insect barrier, including the Beet Leafhopper, which comes in from the desert plants and inoculates our tomatoes with the “Curly-Top Virus”. I've read on the web that it will also protect plants from "white flies" with which I have no experience.
Now the next thing to determine is how much shade your plants will tolerate. I think I must have contacted twenty five or so State Horticulture Extension Agencies, but could never find information that I could use. There is just to many variables such as light intensity, day length, etc. to give specific advice. Now here’s the scoop – what I’m successfully using is Ken-Bar’s Typar T-518 which is 1.25 oz/sq yd spun bonded polypropylene to cover the hoops and a clear 6 mil UV treated green house plastic for the ends. The T-518 allows 70º light penetration which is sufficient for the Southwestern Deserts and this is how I know.
About 40 years ago, I observed a County Public Works Director ask a young engineer to test the strength of an old dilapidated county bridge. After about ten days, I heard the young engineer tell the Director that the bridge was good for a twenty ton load. The Director ask whom he had to do the testing, the young engineer said that he had loaded a semi truck with 20 tons of sand and driven it over the bridge several times. That’s what one would call empirical knowledge and that’s how I know that 70º light penetration is sufficient for the southwestern deserts. It was a very expensive way to find out when I thought I would have been able to just ask someone. Before I forget – some PHD from Washington State University had this to say “Gases that escape from PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride Pipes) as it deteriorates and escapes contributes to the deterioration of the polyethylene plastic row covers. To prevent this off-gassing, paint the PVC pipes with white latex paint”. I do this each year but can’t really tell if it helps – makes my hoops sure look better anyhow.
Now you know, and you can bet on it. One way the Typar T-518 comes is a 15 X 100 foot roll costing at retail about $54.00 plus freight, about $70.00 total. I cut 11 covers 9 X 11.25 feet each with 3.75 feet of my 15 foot wide roll being wasted. One may put “Typar T-518” in a search engine to find retail sources. I also purchased a 12 X 100 foot of 6 mill clear green house plastic, UV Treated, for about $80.00 including freight from a greenhouse growers supply company, sufficient for the two ends for 20 of my hoop houses. All the other materials for the “Garden Biosphere” were purchase from local retailers in El Paso, Texas.
How to grow Tomatoes and build a “Garden Biosphere” 1. Select a garden site in full sun with at least 12 inches of top soil. Most horticulture extension agents will suggest you secure a soil analyses to determine how much fertilizer you need. Now here’s a secrete – adequate fertilizer for a home garden cost less than one soil test. There’s a past extension agent by the name of George Brookbanks that wrote a book on Desert Gardening after he retired from Pima County Arizona. His suggestion for desert gardening was tilling in per 100 square feet of garden space eight cubit feet of composted steer manure, six pounds of soil sulfur, and four pounds of 16-20-0 in the form of ammonium phosphate if you can find it. Most of the time you will have to be content with a blend of 16-20-0 without knowing the source of the elements. This is all I ever use and the total cost less than one soil test. I suppose in a large operation that there is some danger of polluting ground water or local streams but for my 250 square foot tomato patch, it’s really is a ridiculous assumption. 2. Build a 2 X 4 frame that is 8 feet long X 5.5 feet wide as inside dimensions. Now set this frame on your garden site making it absolutely level using a carpenter’s level. You can do this before you set your sub-surface drip lines unless you like set your drip lines twice. 3. I have four irrigation lines of drip tape placed 18 inches apart that dispenses 40 gallons of water per hour per 100 feet of tape buried between 3 and four inches deep. Some people call this a sub-surface drip system. The water flow is controlled by a “Bermad Automatic Metering Valve” with a 200 mesh filter and a 10 # pressure regulator. Water is applied 3 times per week at 75 percent of the Potential Evaporation Transpiration Rate (PET) for El Paso, the County where I’m located. I think one could use less water but I am unable to tell when a plant is stressed for water, don’t see too well, and determining the minimum water requirement should be done by someone who is being paid to do so, as I don’t care to risk losing a year’s production on an experiment. You will have terrific living mulch of tomato plants and the water is applied sub-surface with no visible free water to evaporate. 4. Now we need eight ½ inch by 18 inch rebar stakes. This takes 12 feet off a 20 foot length of rebar. Duct tape is used to wrap the rebar stakes with several layer about ¼ inch thick where top side of the duct tape is six inches from the end of the stake. This creates a stop for the end of the ½ inch PVC pipe hoop to rest on so it will not work itself deeper in the soil making the house uneven. 5. After all stakes are wrapped with duct tape, drive a stake in at each of the inside corners of your leveled frame. Now measure 32 inches toward the middle from each end and drive the other four stakes. The stakes are driven in the ground where the top of the duct tape is even with the surface of the soil. 6. Now we need four six inch long ½ inch reinforcement bars to go across the two PVC Tees and two PVC crosses. These can be cut from the eight feet or rebar we have left. Each end of these reinforcement need to also be wrapped with duct tape sufficient for them to be loosely wedged in the end of the ½ PVC pipe and across the PVC fitting for insertion of the mid-rib sections. 7. Secure two ½ inch slip PVC tees, two ½ inch PVC slip crosses, five 10 foot lengths of schedule 40 PVC pipe, and two 10 foot lengths of 1 ¼ or 1 ½ schedule 40 PVC pipe. Take one of the lengths of ½ inch pipe and cut three 30 inch long nipples to be use as sections to the mid-rib, the rest of this length of pipe is waste so you may save it to club the rabbits that get to your garden. Cut the other four 10 foot lengths of ½ inch pipe exactly in half so you will have two five foot length of pipe for each of the four hoops.
8.
Now is the time to lay your flattened out tomato cages of concrete
wire on the ground. You can get the reinforcing wire in 5’ X 50’ lengths for
about $25.00 from which you can cut seven 5’ X 7’ pieces, now called our
sprawling platform. The one time I did this I found that the 50 foot roll I
had purchased was some more than full measure. Surprised me to. The
reinforcing mesh is of 6 inch grids made of 10 gage wire which is a little
small to transplant a tomato plant thru so I cut a 12 inch cross from this
10 gage wire one foot from each end of the platform making to two 12” grids
four feet apart centered in the hoop house in which to transplant the
tomatoes. Looks and sounds simple, it’s not. I’ve miss cut more than on
piece of re-mesh. You need a small bolt cutter to cut this 10 gage wire, or
else some really big side cutting pliers that you don’t mind ruining. 9. Now you can install your hoops, use two of the five foot length with a ½ inch slip tee for each of the two end hoops. First place a tee on one end of a 5’ length of pipe, use no cement, maybe just a little liquid dishwater soap for a lubricant and tap it into place. The smart ones on the internet say to use a rubber mallet to do this; I did the first year and lost the mallet, now I just use a rock, monkey wrench, or anything else handy for this purpose. Next we will insert one of the six inch reinforcement thru the tee and in the end of the ½ inch X 5’ PVC pipe – next is to tap on the other piece of 5’ PVC pipe. Remember we have wrapped each end of this 6” long rebar with duct tape so it will stay in place while we upend our now 10’ long hoop to place it over the ½ inch rebar stakes. Place one end in place and then bow the hoop and place the other end on the corresponding stake on the other side. Surly you can determine that the tee or crosses in the middle of the hoop must me aligned with the surface of the ground. Now proceed with the two middle hoops, using ½ crosses instead of tees. Next install the three 30” ½ PVC nipples previously cut for the mid-rib and your frame is complete.
10.Planting your tomatoes: Tomatoes grow when the minimum night
temperature is above 50 degrees and below 70 degrees. This is called our
window of opportunity for production. I normally buy the first tomato plants
I can find in the spring. Our last killing frost is about March 12th
in El Paso. I would prefer to plant seeds in 3 inch cups between Christmas
and New Years, transferring them to six inch pots on or about February 15th
for a couple of weeks and then transplanting to my garden protected in
walls-0-water on top of my re-mesh platforms that now lay on the ground at
or about March 1st each year. Now bear in mind that our “garden
biospheres” and Walls-O-Water are temperature modulators for as much as 3 to
5 degrees. What I’m guessing is that the temperature will be 3 to 5 degrees
warmer in the winter and 3 to 5 degrees cooler in the summer. Works much
like a large body of water and this greatly extends our “Window of
Opportunity” for the micro-climate we have created for growing tomatoes.
This fact, along with protection from wind and insects makes the “Garden
Biosphere” very desirable to we who like to grow our own. I’m told that any
wind of 15 miles per hour or more is detrimental to growing plants. If this
be true, then we only have two days per year to grow plants in the desert
southwest. This fourth year I’ve selected two plants of “Super Fantastic”,
Two Plants of “Champions” and two trial varieties developed by a friend
“Paul Aston” One, a paste tomato is of an indeterminate type, is good, the
other is of no value.
11.Installing the ends of the hoop house: You will have a five foot
length of plastic from a 12 wide, (six mil UV treated) greenhouse plastic
roll. This is to be cut exactly in half so that you will have a 5’ X 6’
piece of plastic to install on each end. A 12’X 100’ foot roll of the
plastic can be purchased from gg@horticulturesupply.com
for about $80.00.
12.Installing the row cover: Typar T-518 comes is a 15 X 100 foot roll
costing at retail about $70.00. Some one is going to have to fold this 15
feet wide roll once to make it 7.5 feet wide and the back fold it on each
side to make it 3.75 feet wide and after trimming one of the 3.75 feet
folds off, they will then roll it all up again.
13.Securing the side of the row cover to the ground. I’ve tried several
methods of doing this and one that works is an eight foot 2 X 4 lying gently
over the row cover on the ground at the bottom on each side. If you have the
cover centered you will have eight or nine inches to attach to the ground.
You don’t hold the row cover down – you wedge the row cover between the 2 X
4 and the bottom of the hoops with two wedging stakes. You still have six
feet of the 20 foot length of rebar from which to cut 4 eighteen stakes.
14.Removing the “Walls-O-Water” and raising the sprawling plat form.
Actually I like to do this after the ends are placed and before the cover is
installed. When the plant start growing out the top of the Wall-O-Water is
time. This will be about the date of the last killing frost in the spring.
About March 15th in El Paso TX. Best get a helper as one person
don’t have three hands to pull straight up off the vine and keeping it open
at the same time. Two people with four hands work just fine.
Bill of Materials 1. A sub surface system for irrigation. 2. A six X ten feet of garden space, good drainage and at least 12 inches top soil. 3. Soil amendments sufficient to utilize at 4#s of 16-20-0 (ammonium phosphate), 6#s soil sulfur and eight cubit feet of steer manure for each 100 sq ft of garden space you intend to use. One pint jar of dry soil amendments is considered a pound in garden talk. 4. Four 2 X 4s X 8s from which to build a frame, smaller dimensions acceptable, so long as lumber is absolutely straight. One frame can be used by all so all could divide the cost; however I need it for the demonstration. 5. One 20 foot length of ½ inch concrete reinforcing bar from which to cut stakes. 6. One roll of 1 ½ or 2 inch duct tape. 7. Five ½ X 10 feet long schedule 40 PVC pipe. 8. Two 1 ¼ X 10 feet long schedule 40 PVC pipe. 9. Two ½ inch PVC pipe slip tees. 10. Two ½ inch PVC pipe slip crosses. 11. Five feet of 12 foot wide (six mil green house plastic. 12. Nine feet of 11.25 feet wide Typar T-515 row Cover. 13. Seven feet of 5’ wide 6 X 6 10 gage concrete reinforcing mesh to be used for your sprawling platform. 14. Twelve used one gallon coffee containers. 15. A small container of liquid soap. 16. Some white latex outside paint, the smallest container you can find. 17. A few nails and the necessary tools, like a circle saw with Carborundum blade to cut metal, something to hammer with, carpenter square, tape measure, carpenter level, a small bolt cutter, an inexpensive 1 ½ inch wide sponge paint brush, and a pair of plastic pipe cutters is all I can think that is needed. Also a drill to pre drill nail holes would help.
Spring Harvest 2003 End October 19, 2003 |
