Mobile Garden

One of the big problems with living full time in an RV is that it's a bit of a challenge to get a garden of any decent size going. It's not like I can just pull up a section of grass, mulch in some compost and get my seedlings in - which would be the least expensive way to go... Instead it's all about container gardening...

Over the past month or so Becky and I have been growing seedlings in mini-greenhouse containers. Unfortunately, we had a record breaking heat wave that came through and we hit temperatures of 107+ in the sun. Determined not to have the whole family suffering, I spent the day hooking up our portable air conditioner and tried to keep everyone cool. I forgot about the plants in the greenhouses sitting outside... Just about everything died as it cooked in the non-vented greenhouses. There was some corn, a few tomatoes and some chives that kind of made it through, but nothing else was recoverable.

This past week we had been collecting heirloom plants from local nurseries so we can get a first crop in while our next batch of seeds get sprouting. Yesterday we planted the purchased plants in their larger containers along with the few survivors of our accident. We bought organic soil from one of the nurseries and mixed it with some miracle grow and steer manure mixes we had picked up earlier at the local department store. The containers came both from the department store and some recycled ones from a nursery that I bought for $0.50 each.

For watering I decided to go with an inexpensive drip irrigation system. I drilled holes in top edge of the pots so I could lock the lines in place since we plan to move the pots around as the plants get too crowded. The plan is to keep the garden simple and easy to care for as well as easy to move around if necessary. I left some slack in the water lines to make moving them around easier. The whole system is hooked up to a manual timer so I can just dial in the number of minutes I want to water each day. I could replace that with a completely automated timer, but the weather is quite varied here and I don't want to be watering on a foggy or rainy morning.

If it works well, it should make it a lot easier for us to have fresh vegetables and herbs right outside the RV door during the growing season.

Today we're expanding our container garden to a second row of pots so we can plant more vegetables. We'll have a whole batch of seedlings to put into containers in a few more weeks. If I have the timing right, the harvest time for the various vegetables should be spread out enough so we won't be stuck with too many of one variety at once. We'll see...