A Gardeners Forum Forums Members History Forum Life 2005 Plant A Row Gardening

Greetings all!

I am an experienced fruit/vegetable gardener who is starting to dabble in flowers. I tend to like flowers in the exotic or tropical category: orchids, plumeria, gardenia, bird of paradise, etc and these tend to be a bit more difficult in my zone 5 garden. Although my plumeria are getting quite big, and I got one pineapple to bear fruit ahead of the three year schedule. I've got a lot more pineapple that should bear fruit on their own in another year.

I don't know when I stumbled over this site, but it was in my bookmarks under gardening. I am doing some research for my garden club. We started a plant A Row for the Hungry program 5 years ago in our community garden plots. The plots have water spigots, but no hoses. We have to carry the water from the spigot to the plots and then hand water. It wasn't a big deal when we only had 4 or 5 plots, but now we've expanded to 8 plots or more. Last year we donated over 2,000 lbs of fresh produce to our local food pantry.

I'm trying to come up with a "poor gardener's" drip irrigation system: a garbage can as a reservoir, and hose or pvc for the drip lines. It would make it easier on the older members not to have to hand water, and then we could spend time on caring for the plants and harvesting instead of watering. We'll still have to haul the water, but the watering is much more time consuming. We've seen a few of them on the garden plots, but only for specific applications: i.e. gigantic pumpkins. Those don't cover 20+ rows. Does anyone have any suggestions, experience or plans that they can share?

Sorry for the long post. I tend to be long winded.

Welcome (back?) Don't you worry yourself about being long winded...there are several windy folk around here. Thank you for sharing the great projects you have going...thank you for feeding our hungry friends.

Hi PAR_Gardener,
I dont' get in this section too often, but
wanted to say HI to you and Welcome you to The Garden Helper's Forum....

I saw your post about the "plant~a~Row~for~the~Hungry" Program....
Would love to have you start a new thread on that
and give us some clues how to get one started and how you did yours and others and where you go
to donate it and what you grow to donate......

I have been very interested in that for a little bit and would love to hear any and all info on it
and maybe some of our other gardeners may take an interest in it too!!!

Weezie

P/S I think I've seen a product that might help,
but I'm short on time this morning and will hunt down the info for you later.....

P/S/S We LOVE long winded posts and people

Weezie, I'll post some thing about plant a Row in the Fruit & Veggies section. Being long winded, I'd be more than happy to talk about it.