Grow Camp

2018 Still holding together!

2018-07-08T15:10:00.001-07:00

First, the porch. All tomatoes, 7 money makers and 3 beefsteak.

The good ole Grow Camp, it has seen better days.

I put a banding strap around the bottom as the seems were really starting to split due to erosion/expansion.

The felcro is pretty dried out and cracking.

The two end pieces were replaced with screen. I had a vandal cut up one side to steal the sprinkler system and a bunch of dirt oddly enough. Turns out it was a kid that lives behind me and he was super high on something one night and decided he was going to start his own pot farm... by stealing all my gardening stuff - he took a lot of stuff, got into the shed too. His folks were nice enough and I got most of the things back.

This year I have cucumbers (bottom) green beans (top right) and a bunch of carrots (top left) which I've never been successful with in the Grow Camp but this is brand new seeds.

Eventually something major is going to give out on this but I got over 8 years of use out of this system, with all the weather you could throw at it and it's still working. That's pretty impressive.

Wiener dog is always happy to help out...

...especially getting a fresh green bean out of the deal.

This is the only water timer I've ever had. I've taken it apart and lubed up all the gears and ball valve once or twice. Keeps on rockin.

Mid June 2012

2012-06-19T13:33:00.001-07:00

Mid June 2012

Last years garden didn't do so well. Partially because we got so much rain, it seemed like it rained all through the summer last year, and partially because I didn't do anything with the soil from the prior year, just stuck plants in it. They didn't like that.

This year is going much better!
We have a new garden project with some friends this year. A 24' by 48' open field plot in a historical park...

It huge!

Started 1/2 from seeds like I usually do and then we went and got different kinds of plants from some green houses. We're trying some new things like brussels sprouts, egg plant, bok choy along side the standard fare of tomatoes, cucumbers, squash, peas, peppers and corn. We have plenty of room and full sun out here!

Here's the seeds I started...

Once we got that going I got to work on the stuff back home...

Everything in the Grow Camp came back on it own! We had a bunch of lettuce in there but we ate it.

Mainly herbs like chives, dill, basil,

This year I turned all the soil (between the plants) and added some cheap compost on the top.

Red skins came back strong, I only planted about 6 of them late last year...

Once again trying this weird hanging tomato pot that never really works very well, only I completely turned the soil inside and added compost this time. Trying cherry tomatoes this time around. Maybe they will fall, and maybe they will try and grow up and break and die...?

This is a composting ball. It's quite unique, sits on ball bearings so you can easily roll it around to stir stuff up.

Requires a big wrench to get the top off. Then there are tubes all around for air flow and they poke inside about 3" - 4" to act like tines in a blender to mix all the organics together.

It does tend to leave a crop circle in the lawn unless you move it occasionally.

Dackel likes to help out.

On the porch I made sure to thoroughly mix (turn) all of the soil in the pots and then add new on top. Last year I didn't turn the soil, just added some, and I think that is why our plants started out looking great but then died out. We actually had some good looking cucumbers starting and then they up and died.

I'm starting a few Elm trees called a Shady Tree. We have these at work and they are a small but very durable tree and really cast some shade. If they keep doing well I'll try putting them in the yard next year.

Brussels sprouts (and Dacky trying to trigger a motion activated sprinkler head)!

Maters.

Strawberries in a controlled environment this time! They took over in the Grow Camp, never again.

Egg plant.

We took the clear vinyl sides completely off for the summer. The two on the right side were full of cracks and holes due to the sun.

The cables are still holding. I'll wait until one breaks before dig any deeper into that potential issue.

He doesn't look it, but Dacky is really having a blast trying to trigger this sprinkler. It only runs for a few seconds but it's enough to cool him off and keep him intrigued to make it go again!

That's our start for 2012.

Tidying up

2011-07-11T13:32:00.000-07:00

We have maters!
So far this is it though.
These are the only plants we bought, the rest were all started from seed so they still need some time to grow yet.

I pulled out all of the strawberries and replanted them on the hill. Now we have about 40% free room in there so we went and got some more plants.

A few herbs...

And a bunch of sweet peas...

That's pretty much all we could find being so late in the vegetable season now.

We have Dill trees!

I noticed a big problem with the Grow Camp cables, they are rusting from the inside. I don't give them much more than a year before they start breaking. I tried to get some good photos showing this problem...

I had to let the camera focus on my fingers to get clear shots of the cables.

The first reaction was "it's because of your sprinklers in there", but that can't be the problem because you are going to hose the thing down one way or another, plus it's sitting out in the rain, it's going to get wet!

These are obviously steel braided cables and they have a thick rubberized jacket on them but either moister/humidity is wicking it's was down inside the jacket from the ends, or the jacket is semi-permeable allowing moisture in. Since the rusting is pretty even all over the cable I'm leaning towards the semi-permeable idea. So apparently the jacket is not air tight and oxygen free like they should be. Probably a manufacturing fowl up on China's part I'm guessing, but these are going to need to be replaced with something that holds up much better. I'm not sure what I am going to do about it at this point, probably wait until one breaks and then contact Grow Camp and or the US distributor again. These are part of the frame so they should have a lifetime warranty.

In other news, we have a bunch of Pillbugs...

Not a big deal, they are just eating the rabbit poop from when the rabbits snuck in there over the winter.

10 Cool Facts About Pillbugs

I'll get some pics of Strawberry hill if all those guys make it after the move.

July 2011

2011-07-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

Everything is growing great! We have...
On the porch.
2 Cucumber plants. 2 Green squash. 12 or so tomato plants of different variety, including cherry, roma, beef-steak, money-maker and one I simply called "Big" (probably canning tomatoes). 4 jalapeno's started. 2 habanero plants. 2 Big black seed - loose head lettuce that I pulled from the grow camp. And a bunch of onions that came pre-started from a local farm and are only called "sweet".

I built a little shelf I call the "tomato shelf". Tomatoes have been a problem, they overwhelm the grow camp and they don't ripen or produce much on the hot tub due to they don't get sun until about 1pm. They need more sun and some wind, so this location solves both of those requirements, hopefully! This spot gets sun at 10am. It's just a test this year, but if it works out I'll build a better shelf.

In the Grow Camp.
Gourmet red lettuce and several black seed - loose head lettuce. Strawberries (more on them in a minute). 4 Spinach plants. More "sweet" onions. 2 or 3 green pea vines. 3 or 4 green beans. 6 carrots. And basil, dill, chives and sage for herbs.

Herbs

Strawberries everywhere!

Onions, carrots and spinach.

The strawberries are doing too well in there and taking over, so I think I'm going to pull most if not all of them.

There's a steep hill on the other side of the porch that I want to populate with plants to cut down the erosion, so I might try moving all the strawberries here and see how they do...

This thing has some sickly looking tomato plants hanging out, but they all have tomatoes on them, surprisingly.

I don't much like this system, but we'll see how it does over time.

Planted 2011

2011-06-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

Finally got everything planted today. Our weather has been either stormy or blistering hot with nothing in between, but today wasn't too bad so we got all the sprouts planted and outside.
Some like peppers, squash, cucumbers and tomatoes are in pots on the porch because they will over whelm the Grow Camp and block out everything else, as we learned from last year.

This loose head lettuce was transplanted from grow camp. It was the strongest of the lot but it, and many others that sprung up on their own, were crowding out the beans and peas that we want to grow in there.
It didn't like being moved at all but it might recover...

A couple more steak tomato plants on the ground because I ran out of pots.

We plan on moving the tomatoes out next the grow camp so they get full sun. On the patio they only get sun from about 1pm on.

Hanging tomatoes are doing pretty good even though 2 of them were broken.

Chives, carrots and now a bunch of new sweet onions. This is the sunny spot in the camp and this time we put the small leaf stuff here in hopes it does better. Last year we put tomatoes in this spot and they overwhelmed.

Strawberries are really gaining ground by launching vines to different spots and then taking root.

Lettuce and strawberries are growing (taking over) on their own, none were planted this year, this all grew on it's own from last years crop.

Setup the timed sprinkler system again. 20 min at 7am and 20 min at 7pm.

Onions.

We did finally get a couple replacement clear panels for our cracked ones under warranty from the US distributor. They shipped them fast but they initially argued that the warranty for those was only 1 year. We showed proof from Costco that the warranty was 5 years on those parts and they honored it, but still tried to fight it. They were not very customer service orientated in my opinion.

They tried to charge for the panels initially, but when it was proven that these are under a 5 year warranty, the women told us she was aware of that...? Then why try to first get money out of us, (on the first phone call, but then said "well, ok, no charge THIS time"). But yet the warranty IS in fact for 5 years and they acknowledged that? That is our ONLY complaint about this thus far.

Starting out 2011

2011-04-30T14:01:00.000-07:00

We had a pretty rough winter in MI this year. It's still getting down into the 30's even at the end of April so everything is getting a late start this year. So far we are starting everything from seed this year, which is my favorite way to do a garden. :)
I made a new cat-proof way to start all the seeds down stairs using a wire rack.

I don't think the cats will even try to get up on that because the wires are spaced too wide.

Because we usually over plant I got a little more organized with the seeds this time and put all the past seed sprouts info into an Excel spread sheet. This shows how many seeds were planted vs how many actually sprouted each year that we've used them.

I've sort of been doing this all along but not very organized and all hand written.

Now I have it all in one file and can easily plant less of what I know will sprout.

Then I number each tray and make a table showing where all the seeds are planted. I start with them as circles and then fill them in with a sharpie as they sprout so I can get stats for next year.

The seeds all have a code which I write on the charts and the seed pouches to match everything up without having to write out the long names each time.

The trays are numbered and I also mark a corner on the inside (in red) so I know the orientation of the tray compared to my chart.

Last year we used the plastic inner trays which ended up being a bit of a pain because the sprouts would grow though the bottom and we had to use a razor and slice open each little square to get them out.
This year I reused the big trays but got some organic squares for the inside. These can be separated easily and you just plant the whole thing. I was glad that they actually fit perfectly inside the big trays.

Ok, a little tight, but no problem.

Then outside I have all the porch pots ready to go.

And things like lettuce, cucumbers and hot peppers can all grow on the hot tub cover.
That rope is a wick to drain off any water that pools up on the cover.

Out at the Grow Camp we already have some growth from last years crop.
All of the tomatoes are going to be in pots over here this year where there is more sun. We probably won't put many in the Grow Camp because they just grow too well and end up blocking the sun from other things.

Chives

Lettuce

Strawberries

Onions

Still need to clean up the tomato mess from last year.

Our water is really hard so I'm going to try to clean up the sides where it's stained.

We get a lot of wind right here, mainly due to what I call the "landing strip" and one of the clear covers cracked over the winter and now has a hole about the size of a quarter. I'm contacting the US Grow Camp distributor in NY for warranty replacement instructions. Haven't heard back yet.

That's where we're at so far this year. As you can see the grass hasn't even really taken off here yet.
We are so ready for summer!

Frost

2010-10-03T19:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight we are expected to get some serious frost so the Grow Camp windows are down. I shoved all the spilling tomato plants inside (surely broke most of them, but we might still get more ripe tomatoes from them since they aren't going to get frost). Buttoned up and tucked in the plants the best I could. Threw an old sheet over the peppers and tomatoes on the porch. If they survive they survive. It is fall, and we've certainly eaten very well and healthy from all our plants in the garden this year. We've even canned some of the produce. Now it's a test to see how long into winter we can keep some of the plants going with the Grow Camp sealed up. Should be interesting...

Summer of Delicious

2010-09-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

Even though the Grow Camp is over planted we've been eating loads of tomatoes, green beans, squash, peppers and now tomatillos from it. Everything tastes delicious!
Now we are getting into fall and need to decide how to trim everything back so we can drop the covers down.
Here is a picture post update before we start on that...

The porch tomatoes didn't do very well. The peppers did ok.

The one corn stalk had 3 ears of corn but all got attacked by worms, so we didn't get any of our own corn this year. We knew it was a long shot...

Tomatoes grew up, out and down. They are everywhere!

It definitely turned into a small jungle in there, but the strongest plants sure prevailed. We get about 20 huge green beens, about 50 cherry tomatoes and 10 - 12 big tomatoes every week. Plus all the herbs and the super squash. Having good light and excellent - deep soil in the Grow Camp has really made a big difference in the taste of our harvest. Next we get to find out how long into winter we can keep things growing and see what still produces in the cold Michigan winter. Should be interesting, we will keep this updated. :)

Mystery Squash

2010-08-08T16:47:00.000-07:00

We are not sure what to do with this...

Over Planted

2010-07-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

We have way too much stuff in the Grow Camp, but first...

...my Cayenne's are doing great on the porch!

Jalapeños are doing good too. We have Serrano's in there too but I'm not sure what is what yet.

Tomatoes are doing good.

Hanging tomatoes still aren't "hanging".

We put the corn in a huge pot.

Herbs are doing good, we harvest and use them all the time now.

This is supposed to be tall - loose head lettuce, but it can't get enough sun so it's snaking around all over the place. There are 3 more of these in there that are doing better. We have plenty of lettuce.

This side is just packed, we now leave it open all the time.

We are not sure what these are now, they were supposed to be yellow squash, but these are ridiculously large for squash.

This thing is the size of a football!

A bunch of them are hanging outside the Grow Camp.

Strawberry's are creeping all over, trying to find sun.

Tomatoes are completely out of control. We have way too many in there!

Next year I think we will plant about half of what we planted this year, that or buy another Grow Camp!

Learn by Growing

2010-06-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

Finally pulled the rest of the radishes. Some had nice bulbs, some had no bulb and one turned into a Franken-radish!

Things are really taking off in the Grow Camp. I keep harvesting dill weekly and it still hit the top, so I cut them all down. I've never seen dill grow so tall.

We are starting to eat some lettuce. We have loose head and some gourmet.

Tomatoes are looking like a jungle! We might still need to thin those out more.

Beans are creeping up the wires.

We have peas ready to eat. Not a huge amount but they taste great as a snack.

We are having a little problem with the squash...

It's overwhelming everything, including itself!

Some of the actual squash is rotting due to lack of sun.

So I trimmed them up quite a bit, hopefully I didn't trim too much. We want some squash, but not at the expense of other things in the garden.

This is what I meant by "Learn by Growing". We had no idea this squash, which was started from seed, was going to get that crazy for sunlight. Lets all try and play fair in there guys!

I thinned out all the yellowed bean leaves as well.

Back on the porch things are growing a lot slower, but happily.

We have one corn stalk that popped up from 10 years old seeds. It's doing surprisingly well too...

And we have a new tomato planter that is supposed to let the tomato plants hang down, but so far they keep growing strait up.

Aside from the squash issue everything is still growing great. The water times in the Grow Camp are still set to 20 minutes two times per day and that seems to be plenty.

Bug problem

2010-06-02T18:24:00.000-07:00

Somehow we are getting some leaf-eating bugs in the Grow Camp. Might be tiny aphids, which I've seen, or we might have something else like worms. They might have come in while we were working, snuck in through the screens or they might have came in with the new bean plants we got at a local greenhouse. I did find one tomato moth caterpillar and promptly removed it a couple weeks ago. Regardless they seem to be attacking the new bean plants the most.

They are also chowing on the squash and tomatoes a little.

This happened just today so it cannot go unchecked as we've seen plants get eaten in just a couple days before. So I sprayed lightly with some Ortho that has worked well in the past.

Bugs happen. Especially around here. We've lost many plants to them until we started researching and using some of the insecticides available.

Check out the growth in just the last 3 days. The squash leaves are pushing on the screens!

1 week later

2010-05-30T10:12:00.000-07:00

I just harvested a bunch of radishes, dill, chives and we've been munching on strawberries as they ripen.
Been in the mid 80's and sunny all week so everything is growing like crazy.

We moved many of the tomatoes over to pots on the porch so they don't overcrowd in the Grow Camp.

Warm weather and added a sprinkler system

2010-05-23T16:07:00.000-07:00

All of the sudden our weather is in the 80°s and sunny! The warm weather is great but it's going to get dry in no time so I made a sprinkler system for the garden that runs via automatic water valve.

I initially set it to water at 7am and 6pm for 20 minutes each. This is subject to change depending on our weather and how dry the soil feels after a couple days.
This uses 1/4" OD nylon tubing with 5 little Rainbird sprinkler heads.

It runs up the side and then down into the A frame bracket, which I loosened up a little.

Then the hose is zip-tied to the support bar running the length of the Grow Camp.

Here's a video of it in action.

Because the soil is so chunky (we had to break up a lot of it by hand) I decided to add some earth worms to help break it down. 60 to be exact. They should be very happy in there.

And here is a growth progress update. My Sharpie tags are fading miserably, but by now we pretty much know what is what in there.

Next post should show a lot more growth due to the temperatures finally warming up.

More seedlings

2010-05-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

We've had a lot of morning frost this week so we seal up the covers every night and open it back up in the morning. On Friday we warmed up to 70° with a lot of rain so we left the covers rolled up loosely. The next day the covers were full of water (both my foot and our little dog who was right next my feet got soaked discovering this!) so I decided to start rolling them up by rolling them under rather than over so there is no way they can capture water.

Saturday we planted another tray of seedlings and made up some tags.

I made the tags from some plastic post cards and then wrote on them with Sharpies. These are Danvers 126 carrots.

Peas have a lattice to climb up on. We have a combo of Alaska wilt-resistant and Sugar Sprint.

Black-seeded Simpson loose head Lettuce. These are from 10 year old seeds and we usually only get one strong plant from them. But one plant produces plenty and they grow to about 2 feet tall. I got many sprouts this year and only put 4 in the Grow Camp. I'll plant the rest in pots. If these guys take off we will be giving away a LOT of lettuce!

We have 3 different kinds of radish...
White Icicle.
Beauty Mix.
Sparkler White Tip.

We've never had any luck growing Cantaloupe and there's only 3 seedlings, so we'll see if the Grow Camp improves our luck.

Strawberries. We bought these from a local greenhouse, they are doing very well.

We have a variety of herbs.

Four different kinds of tomatoes.

Big boy hybrid.

Steak sandwich hybrid.

Moneymaker.

2 different kinds of Cherry.

This is Dackel, our 3 month old puppy snoozing in the sun (and possibly still drying off!).

We still have one more tray to plant which is mostly herbs that are slow starters. I also have many hot peppers started but I think I'm going to plant all of those in pots. The Grow Camp is likely going to be too crowded for them, and they like a lot of space.

Our neighbors are pretty impressed with this system. If these all take off as expected we will be giving them some extras... we can only eat so much. ;)

Planting

2010-04-21T15:32:00.000-07:00

Planting is easy because it is way up off the ground. We drew a little diagram where we split the Grow Camp into 4 sections so we could remember what we planted where.The peas will climb up the lattice we placed in there.

Spacing, especially with sprouts this small, will be by trial and error this first time around. We've run into spacing problems using the pots before but this is so deep you can space things much closer so we'll see how it all works out.

Of course after replanting you need to soak all the plants and showering through the screen works amazingly well to diffuse the water into a light rain for the tiny seedlings.

We might get some frost tonight so we sealed it all up.

Setting up outside

2010-04-21T15:05:00.000-07:00

I took a couple days off this week to setup the Grow Camp. Our weather in Michigan is sunny and about 70°, perfect weather to work outside.

First I set up the base and picked a spot that would get full sun, level and made sure I could still mow around everything. We are on the top of a hill so level ground is rare in our yard. Even this spot wasn't level, I had to dig a 1" trench on the shed side and the right end so it would sit level. To dig the trench I took a cheap box cutter knife, extended the blade all the way and locked it, then cut the grass right along the base on either side. Slid the base over a little and used a small hand shovel to dig out the trench. After a little bit of tweaking I got it to sit almost perfectly level. I used the grass from the trench to line the inside walls that were not in a trench to fill any gaps where soil might seep out.

Once that was done I lined the bottom with a cloth weed blocker and taped it loosely to the sides with paper painters tape.

Now the dirt. My neighbor across the street had 5 yards of sifted top soil in his driveway and said I could take as much as I needed, so I did! I even used his wheel barrel. About 12 trips back and fourth, a sweat band on my head, I got it filled with about 4" to spare. I then added a bag of peat (I planned on using 2 bags but I underestimated how much coverage a bag would do). Then 6 bags of Miracle-Gro vegetable soil mix. And finally 4 bags of PH balanced compost.

After we got everything put together I noticed that there were quite a few pins left over, 16 to be exact, and there were only supposed to be 8. Looking all over I discovered that I missed all the pins that go under the top rails.

Since I had already pinned the end for this support bar I had to take it all back apart and use some large wire cutters to remove the pins so it could be reinstalled after pinning the top part. I used a small hammer to tap many of the pins in, they can be a little tough to push in by hand.

We put these little felt pads wherever the S hooks would rub on the plastic.

We sometimes get really high winds so this should prevent any damage from the plastic flapping around and rubbing on the S hooks. The ends and even the rounded part have some rough edges from however they form these.

We can't grow everything in the Grow Camp, so I'll use the extra peat mixed with planting soil in the potted stuff like all the hot peppers, some corn and probably some of the bigger tomato plants.

Here's me just before we started planting some of the bigger sprouts like squash, cantaloupe, peas and radishes. We bought a few strawberry plants from a local greenhouse to see how they do.

Day 2

2010-04-20T19:55:00.001-07:00

We are starting most plants from seed, 3 trays of 72 compartments each. Some of our seeds are old and never germinate so we try and spread it out with a mix of old and new seeds to see what works and also be sure to have a good harvest. I've learned that it helps to document seed growth from sprout to the produce quality to determine what we want to plant the next year.

Grow Camp day 1

2010-04-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

I ordered this through Costco online. They had a deal with 2 sections and $100 off with free delivery. This seemed like the perfect solution to our garden in a small yard. The last two years we did a patio garden in pots and plastic tubs, while it worked pretty well and we had a lot of vegetables, we were constantly fighting pests and we didn't have full sun for things like cucumbers and melons. We debated several options to have a raised box garden on the side of the house with more sun. The main problem we kept running into was how to deal with the pests like rabbits and still be able to work on it, that and we would need bug spray for everything which we aren't fond of.

The Grow Camp was definitely the way to go in our case and I was glad to have found it.

It arrived via Fedx on April 15th in a 127lb box left in the driveway. Heavy stuff, sorry Fedx guy! Inside that box was the Grow Camp Basic and 2nd box for the Grow Camp extension.

I pre-built it in the basement, without pinning everything so I could take it back apart, to make sure I had all the parts. It went together quite easily following the diagram instructions.

All the parts fit perfect and the only minor bugs I noticed were 1) one of the top A frame joints had the locking tabs backwards, obviously a plastic mold error, but not anything that affected the assembly or structural integrity. 2) The S hooks are rather sharp and have burrs (more on this later). 3) The center - middle A frame connector had a burr on one end that I had to take a razor blade and trim it down in order to make it fit.

It is quite well designed and manufactured otherwise. I broke this back down in less than 10 minutes and it was easy to rebuild it out in the yard .