Drip watering systems

Drip watering systems

With the impending water restrictions, water conservation will become everyone’s biggest gardening problem. Here is a page that describes watering system that will save you water.  The secret is is to use drip tapes or drip lines with pre-installed emitters, spaced 1′ apart, and to lay these tapes at 1′ intervals. This produces a ‘moisture zone’ at the roots of your plants. There may be drier spots on the surface, but below ground the 1′ grid leaves an evenly moist garden bed.

The second part of the secret is to cover the tapes and the beds with a generous layer of mulch. Mulch insulates the soil from drying winds and sun. Not only does this save water, but the mulch reduces the total amount of ewater needed, and by preventing evaporation from the surface, reduces the salt build up at the surface that is common with our alkaline water supply.

Click here to read the full article on how to install Drip Watering Systems.

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Camarillo Community Garden Website

Camarillo Community Garden website.

The Camarillo Community Garden is the result of a grass-roots movement;
people with a common commitment to the citizens of Camarillo. Our goal is to empower our neighbors, to encourage them to take control of their own food supply, to enjoy a more healthful life style, educate youth about where food really comes from, build a sense of community among citizens, reduce their food costs, and reduce the over-all load that highly commercialized agriculture places on the environment.

The project is currently recruiting support from the City of Camarillo, its Parks & Recreation Department, civic and fraternal organizations, and local business owners. This web site will serve to coordinate group efforts, publicize events, and eventually to gather applications for garden plots.

Much work remains to be done, from locating land, providing water, fencing, gardening materials and tools, promoting support from local organizations. Please pitch in and help us bring this project to fruition. Add your name to the petition, sign up for our newsletter, or volunteer.

This site is up and running, and open to all gardeners, especially those in Camarillo.

Gardening Coaches Grow Gardeners

Gardening Coaches Grow Gardeners.

I’m a relatively new gardening coach, but I am a Master Gardener and have 20-some years of landscape contracting and design behind me. I really enjoy showing people how to have the garden and landscapes they want, but at a lower cost and lower environmental impact than they can get without knowing what they are doing.

My main service is education, and I gather that is true of most of the people here, whether you think of yourselves as a ‘coach’, ‘mentor’, ‘facilitator’ or ‘consultant’. The only one of a list I saw of services that falls outside of this is ‘Personal gardener’, which doesn’t suggest that the client is learning to do it themselves.

Large corporations have studied learning, and what they have found is that for the best retention, students need to have hands-on experience. Lecture somebody til you are blue in the face, wave you arms as much as you want, and they will retain 5% of what you say. When they learn by actually doing, the retention comes up to 75%. Add immediate practice to the mix, and they retain over 80% of the material. Doing the work FOR them is really doing them a disservice, doing it WITH them makes tour visits a truly valuable service.

I have been working with Susan Harris to set up a forum for gardening coaches. The goal is to create a safe environment for us to ask and answer questions, exchange ideas, develop and exchange tactics and strategies, solve common problems, share reference materials we use, etc. By joining forces, we can create a united front – a world-wide association of coaches.

We all share common, or at least similar, goals and problems. I’d like to invite all of you to join us at http://gardening-coaches.com/forum/ and take part in the discussions as we learn and grow together. Go to the above link, register, and leave a note in your profile that you are a coach to get access to a private area just for coaches. There is also a public area where you can interact with the general public.

Let’s not just grow gardeners – let’s grow a movement.

Gardening Coaches Forum

via A New Gardening Coaches Forum

I have set up a forum for gardening coaches. This is a public site with a private ‘coaches lounge’ to discuss our businesses , exchange ideas and help forge this new and needed industry.

Coaches should take a moment when Registering to introduce themselve to gain access to the private area. Click the above link to go to the forum.

Update…

This site contains interesting stuff I run across relating to gardens, especially Victory and Community Gardens, and with science-based gardening information on when to plant veggies, recommended varieties, plant symptoms and their causes, book and tools, etc..

Click here to visit the Camarillo Community Garden web site or its discussion forum

Click here to visit myGardening Coacheswebsite.

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