Dave and I have been gardening in this garden in Utah for a couple of years now. The land belongs to Dave's parents. They have an irrigation ditch that runs along the street (the far side on this first picture), then water hookups at the end of each row on the right. These pipes are pvc that have had little holes punched into them, so that the water sprays down evenly into each row. This system is on two timers that runs for 20 minutes everyday/every other day. One timer controls one half of the rows and the other the second half. This can also be accomplished with a drip-line system, which is available at home depot and sprinkler stores. If you use a drip line, you will need it to drip water for 2-4 hours every night.
The pipes are suspended in air with small bricks, so that the holes in the PVC don't get clogged. It's important when setting up these pipes in the spring, to flush dirt out the end before putting the caps on. You might also notice that the rows are LOWER than the walkways. That's for 2 reasons. One, so we don't flood the walkways and entire garden where we're not even growing anything useful. It just makes the weeds stronger. And two, Utah is dry, and we need to make sure we put the valuable water right where the plants are. Plants can take a surprising amount of water, so filling up the entire row to the brink is actually recommended. For some reason, it's popular for people to make their rows raised, but in Utah, this only leads to water run-off due to the clay soil. The plants really struggle when this is going on.
In gardens where it's been used for several years, it's important that after you plant, you fertilize every two weeks, or whatever your fertilizer instructions tell you. After about 6-8 weeks, fertilizing will become less effective. Without fertilizer, everything will be small, short plants, however, you should still get a decent amount of produce on them. We put left-over potting soil in the dirt where our cherry tomatoes are, so they didn't need any extra fertilizer. They are now over 6 feet tall!
When we first got the rows ready, we had a several step process. First, we tilled down the weeds and raked them out. Second, we made our depressed rows as deep as we could... about 5 inches... with our rake. Third, we used a long wooden beam and a level to make sure they were flat. This is done so that when our water was put in the row, it would fill up and down the whole row without leaving a dry spot... or leaking out. Next we positioned our pipes with our bricks. We planted our seeds on both sides of the row... and for squash that was zigzag about every foot/12 inches.
We don't follow seed instructions very seriously. Often they say 4-6 in a mound, 4 feet apart; I usually do 1-3 every foot. Sometimes that means you'll end up having a gap, but it also means you won't have to thin your plants out. Next we sprinkler our fertilizer down the row (ours are little white-ish pellets), turn on the water, clean out the pipes, cap them, and let the rows fill up with water. The first couple weeks the dirt will take much more water than later weeks, fyi.
This year we made the mistake of tilling one saturday, then planting the next; this gave the weed seeds a week head start on the garden food, and stunted the veggies growth until they had managed to get big enough we could safely weed around them. (You can't weed them when they're too small because 1. you'll run the risk of pulling out the fragile veggie and 2. it's really hard to recognize what's veggie and what's weed.)
The weeks after that, it's just a matter of staying on top of the weeds and fertilizing rows. We liked to till the paths to keep the weeds down, then use a small rake to get the little weed starts out. If you set your watering to 'late in the night', your dirt should be just moist enough that it's fairly easy to pull the weeds out, but not too muddy that you can't get anything done. Also, watering at night is a great way to save yourself on the water bill. Watering during the day leads to a lot of the water 1. being used to just 'cool down' the dirt/plants from the hot sun, rather than going deep into the soil for the roots to grow long. And 2. regular sprinklers usually have a significant amount of water that just evaporates or floats downwind. So save yourself on utilities and water when it's dark out.
As the summer gets real hot, Dave and I woke up earlier on Saturdays to go weed. We can do about one row each per 1.5 hours, and we work faster when it's cool weather. Some veggies take longer to weed than others, fyi. Squash is really quick, but carrots are super tricky. A couple of times we've gone twice a week when the weeds were getting ahead of us. We try to do 2 rows a week. (We have 8 rows that are each about 30 feet long.) When you're weeding, it's also very helpful to take out the rocks. In carrot and onion rows, underground rocks can be devastating to your harvest. An onion or carrot will not move the rocks out of the way, but simply grow around it, or just stop growing all together. On top of that, onion rows need to be prepared with extra deep depressions because as the onion bulbs grow, you need to rake more dirt on top of them. Shallow rows means your water will escape half way through the season.
Lastly, make sure you know WHEN to harvest your food! Last year, we waited too long to harvest onions, and the bulbs had shrunk for the oncoming winter. If you pick your veggies regularly, they will grow more veggies. If you leave them to rot on the vine, you're plant will stop producing. So whether or not you'll be able to get around to using all that food, you Must pick it. And pick it WITH the stem... or your plant might not realize the produce is gone, and again, will stop producing. The stem on the veggie also helps the veggie stay good longer. Use scissors or a blade to pick produce.
Today we harvested our first zucchini, several cayenne peppers, a couple of bell peppers, several banana peppers, chard, lettuce, a couple onions for this week's meals, and thinned part of the carrots... which gave us some baby carrots. Our cherry tomatoes came in last week, and we've picked those every 2-3 days.
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