Tropical Boonies: December 2006
Do-It-Yourself Botanical Garden - 2 (4 pages)
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You take a 20 acre piece of S. Florida virgin lowland (there are places where you can find it. C'mon get out of big city)...
...covered with palmetto... |
... being flooded every summer... |
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...you pull out your palmetto - |
...you dig ponds... |
...the deeper the better... |
...any shape you like... |
...and move the material |
...you make it nice and dry, |
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...you put your first pets |
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...If you have sugar sand then not much will grow in it (except palmetto, of course), so you need some organics. Mulch, for example, is very good...Mulch will provide a nice food for your future garden. Put at least 1600 ton (yes, 40 trucks of 40 ton each) of mulch per acre... 3 ft deep mulch will decompose into a thin layer of a good soil in no time...
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...in the meantime, make roads with shellrock...
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When digging trenches, make sure not to cut a telephone line more than 3 times, otherwise the technician will charge you for fixing it...
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...water well set up mixes well-water and pond-water, to ensure good pressure... |
...at cold winter night, you run your irrigation overnight to keep your plants warm; then spend the next day filling the emptied lake, pumping the water backwards - from well into the lake... |
...For cold protection of sensitive plants, we bought a used shade/greenhouse, size of a football field. It came as a huge pile of 24 telegraph poles and miles of cloth... Too bad no assembly manual was included...
...We took it easy and started digging holes...
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...Bobcat was helpful with the poles installation...
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...Little by little... Piece of cake!..
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...untill we realized we were a bit off for a couple feet... no big deal, we'll patch it! |
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The whole idea, which took us 2 days to accomplish, was to make a shade-cloth extension all along the greenhouse length since we screwed up with dimensions and placed telegraph poles with 2 ft error (it's easier to sew the damn thing than re-do the telegraph poles, right?)
Fixing/patching holes in shade-cloth for the greenhouse IN THE FIELD. Items shown:
- sewing machine (operated by Tatiana). Your grandma's antique Singer is the best. Go check your attic.
- special synthetic strong thread brought from Russia 7 years ago "just in case" (guess the case is here)
- Air-compressor for cleaning shade-cloth from sand before sewing (operated by Kim)
- Generator for running the compressor
- Adolfo moving shade-cloth along
- Bobcat (was offered by Mike for moving the whole group along the process, but was rejected by others) - not in use, behind the screen
- "Riksha-style" garden wagon to move the whole damn thing along the greenhouse wall
- Mike with a camera enjoying the HighTech escort view (not shown)
- Umbrella (yep, it was raining)
- Shade-house wall (on the background)
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Forced air-brain cooling so the CPU can be overclocked |
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Inside the shadehouse, before the greenhose (plastic) part was set up, we had to place a temporary structure for cold protection. We called it a "circus tent"...
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Plants enjoying the hot room!
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2 giant heaters keep them warm all night long!
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The most cold sensitive - durians, rambutans, breadfruit, etc. - spend cold nights inside the house...
The project of Conservatory was interrupted by destructive winds... all we could produce was a giant bra... The project still pending for the next year.
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night vision spying... |
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