cat pee/poo are not good things for human contact (or eating if they get splashed on food) so you may wish to discourage the kitty...
i have some feral cats using the sandy loam in the tulip gardens and it smells horrible. when i see them out there i will be discouraging them too.
it's amazing what can be done a little at a time. hang in there...
songbird
I'd love to see a photo. Wonder whether the leaves are furry. Can't really say why but I suspect he's misidentified "New Zealand spinach" (Tetragonia tetragonoides). It's grown as an annual in those parts of North America with a long enough warm season and killing frosts are rare from USDA zone 9b southward. I'm on the 9a-b cusp in peninsular Florida and have dismal success with Swiss chard and beets and only moderate results with spinach but New Zealand spinach does well, requiring only minimal protection save in the very coldest winters and makes a good "cut 'n come again" potherb.
This is an *additional* bed. ("a new raised bed this year.") I already have a large (for an urban garden) area for tomatoes and beans. Herbs have their own bed, which they partly share with rhubarb. This new bed was intended for a couple each of cukes, zukes, and crooknecks, but then I increased it by 50% and decided to put in some strawberries. I don't grow winter squashes, melons, or the like because the part of my lot that gets good sun is limited.
I do intensive gardening with lots of compost and soaker hoses, and I get a lot out of a square foot.
Priscilla
I have 6 "marketmore" cucumbers and 7 "Dixie belle" bush yellow squash in a nominal 3'X4' raised bed. Both were "relay" or succession planted at approximately two-week intervals. That's typical for my garden. The cukes vine on an 8' tall trellis of 6"-mesh galvanized field fencing; the squash shade the bed completely. I picked the first squashes yesterday and the cukes aren't far behind. I never apply mulch. The balance of that 3'X8' bed hosts okra and additional yellow squash. The bed is divided into two zones using separate soaker hoses so that each may be watered individually. I do intensive gardening with lots of compost and soaker hoses, and I get a lot out of a square foot. This past fall-winter, I reclaimed three 3'X8' raised beds that had been unused for almost 10 years. This year, they're for heat tolerant legumes with some sort of "green manure" underplanting. My next "project" is to begin replacing the soaker hoses with drip irrigation. The soaker hoses that I use are the inexpensive kind made from shredded tires. I find them to be short-lived, fragile, difficult to repair and more expensive in the long run, particularly when the "frustration factor" is taken into account.
Click on garden 2011 From left to right: Picture #1 shows some of the Swiss chard.
Picture #2 you can see the seed stalk that has fallen over going from upper middle to middle left, then doubling back to lower middle, and there is a thin stalk that comes from the same stalk that goes up in the middle of the picture and leans off to the right,
Picture #3 shows another stalk that has settled on a wire arbor, where it has created another plant some 4" off the ground, but you can see that it tried to put out roots.
Picture #4 shows a parent plant on the left, and the stalk has set a nother plant to its right.
Oddly enough, I posted a URL to the pictures yesterday, but the post never materialized, so let's try it again. Click on Garden 2011.
From left to right, pic #1 is of some of the chard with some celery in the foreground.
Pic #2 is chard and garlic. The chard's stalk goes from upper middle to middle left, and then turns and goes to bottom middle, where a new growth raises up the middle of the picture to veer off to the right.
Pic #3 shows another chard whose stalk fell on a wire cage, where a new plant tried to put down roots, 4 inches off the ground.
Pic #4 shows chard and garlic with the parent chard and off-spring connected by old seed stalk.
The deal is that these plants don't die after 2 years. They keep making new leaves, and new plants.
You sound like a gardener after my own heart! Getting the most out of every square inch. ;-) I may follow you down the path to drip irrigation, but only time will tell.
Enjoy!
Priscilla
Well, I think I've given the soaker hoses a fair test and IME they just don't hold up in the long run. Over time, at least in this Florida climate, they simply self destruct even when left in place and undisturbed. They develop pinholes that shoot a fine jets of water in every direction, which sort of defeats the slow, low evaporation, soaking concept and, with a little age on them, they become brittle and break at curves and at end fittings. Repairs are difficult and unreliable due to the lack of elasticity of the raw material -- old tires. Mine are on an inline regulator that maintains 22-25 psi regardless of well pump pressure so I'm not exactly exploding them. I think I've decided to go the route of low volume pressure compensated drip emitters. I can use the same regulator and manifold and believe that I can home-brew filtration that's superior to the overpriced commercial products I'm seeing.
Count on it :-)
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