...Wherein our heroes re-engineer the greenhouse to resist rodent incursions...

After last year's battle, we embarked on a 2-fold approach to fight The Woodrats:

With this configuration, so far we haven't seen any evidence of rodent intrusion, and rejoice every morning anew when we open the door to find that's still true, because we've seen just how smart they really are.

Materials list:

• Pure Blend Pro organic nutrient solution
• Elbows, connectors and PVC pipe for Jetflow tray support
• 6" nylon trellis netting for plants to climb
• 1 Jetflow tray and associated drain adapter bits
• Angle-iron supports for netting, and hook-bolts, nuts, washers.

This is the 2nd reservoir in the front of the greenhouse. It feeds both the side trays that we installed in 2001 and the new Jetflow tray that we added this year. The black tube coming out of the innermost hole runs up and under the central table, tees out to the side trays, and then returns via the two black hoses that you see going into the center holes on the reservoir.

This is the Jetflow tray. Since Pat built our own stand, and had the reservoir from last year, we were able to just get the tray from Growking for about $50, without having to buy an entire kit, but if you're just starting off, you can get a complete kit. It's a nice system, and modular, so you can expand as needed. Since this was the last addition to our greenhouse, we're pretty much out of room, and can only use one tray. (However, we're now talking about building a larger greenhouse! :-) )

The tray has two holes in it. One in the very bottom, which is where it fills from, and an overflow hole, which is the tall black pipe you see. This is adjustable to the height you want, in roughly 1.5" increments. (The little pipes stack into one another.) It's currently set at about 6" high, as the tray is 7". Thus, it can fill up and soak all the stones, but not overflow the tray.

I'd wanted to try out this type of system, since a gravel bed allows you to grow root & tuber plants. We filled the tray with about 6" of lava stones, which we had left over from our initial foray into hydroponics.

The first crops planted in this tray include a pepper plant, some basil, eggplant, potato, (many!) radishes, and spinach plants. It would probably also be good for leafy greens and other things. It's nice because you can just sprinkle the seeds directly into the stones, or plant potatoes, etc. We'll probably also try onions and garlic and carrots here in the future.

Another change this year was to replace the rain-gutter drain with a PVC pipe. We had lots of algae growing in the gutter due to the amount of sunlight it got, and this not only clogged the filter, but also took away nutrients from the other plants.

Here's the current setup, in all its glory. You can see all four growing areas, as well as the angle-iron supports we put on the corners of the table and attached via nylon computer cable zip-ties to the framework of the greenhouse. To these we attached hook-bolts and hung more mesh netting across the table. This way, we hope to avoid the nest of strings we had hanging from all over to hold up the plants as they grew. We initially started with the 2 layers you see here above the table, and intend to add a third when the plants get large enough.

We also have two sets of netting hanging on either side of the side trays. One against the greenhouse wall, and one nearer the center, so that plants from each tray can climb easily. In these side trays we plant vining tomatoes and pole beans, in alternating baskets. Thus each plant can climb up (and support!) its neighbors.

And then one day everything went from looking something like this... < ---

...to something like this --- >

During the first week of July we went away for the weekend and came back to an entire greenhouse full of severely-wilted plants! To make a long story short, our computer didn't reboot after a power outage, so there was nothing to start the nutrient pumps for more than a day of 100 degree weather. We spent the next few days doing triage, and finally the tomatos, peppers and most of the pole beans started to recover. The cucumbers and bush beans never did. This episode set the greenhouse back probably several weeks while it recovered. But it did recover : )

Meanwhile, the front tray turned into a jungle of potatos, basil, eggplants, flowering radishes and a volunteer sunflower.