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This is a project that my wife and I have been wanting to do for a while. I started it last weekend and while cutting the first one out it caught in the drill and sliced open my finger. Pretty nasty too. That will teach me to wear gloves when working with sheet metal. So a week later and well on my way to recovery, we decided to tackle it again. This time we had much better success.

	We looked all over the web, local nurseries and my inventory of seed catalogs for cute, affordable and durable plant tags. Durable, in our case, means standing up to years of being soaking wet. We found some cute ones, some affordable ones, and some durable ones.. but none with all three attributes. They were all either cheap, ugly, or expensive ($14 each for plant tags, really??). So what do we do, we design and make our own! I think they turned out really well. Here’s how we made them.
	We started off with a 24×24 sheet of fairly thin sheet metal, cutting it down to 1.5″ strips.
	Then we cut those down to individual sizes.
	Using a metal stamp kit we stamp in each of the names we’re planting this year.
	Grind off the sharp edges.
	Using a fine point sharpie we draw in the metal stamps for better definition, and then drill a hole in the center of the tag.
	12 gauge wire we bought in 10′ sections, cut down to 16″ and bent in half. These form the legs.
	And here we go, the final result. Pretty sweet!
	Here is the back of it. You can see it is just bolted together.
	Quite a few, and still a few more to go. We need about 25 for this year. We are quite pleased with these though. We estimate they cost about 50 cents each to build. Way better than the cheap ones at the nursery and a lot cheaper than the metal ones you can get online.

“I hate dumb junk” is one of my favorite sayings from childhood. One of my biggest pet peeves is things that don’t do their job. If a tool was created for a single purpose and fails to do that purpose, it is worse than a failure.

My garden trowel frustrated me to no end last year. I’d really be digging in and instead of doing the job, it would just bend. Well.. no more!

I built my own. I call it The Apocalypse Trowel. It will take out weeds, or zombies.

	This is 1 inch square steel tubing as the handle, with 1/4 inch steel blade. The two are bolted together with 8mm bolts. I figured the bolts were stronger than a weld.. and since I don’t have a welder, bolts it is.
	This is a close up of the blade. I ground it down on my bench grinder.

Most of my plants are doing pretty well so far. The few days near 90 has caused my spinach to start bolting. I snipped the seed heads off and now the temps are back to normal, highs in the low 70s.

I think one of my bigger problems, especially once it starts to get hot in earnest, is consistent watering. Most vegetables need not only lots of water, but regular and consistent watering. Since I know I’ll fail at that, I decided to let my home automation computer do it all for me. I found this idea over on the cocoontech.com forums.

	Start out with a standard sprinkler valve. These are small solenoids that turn water on and off to in-ground sprinklers. It run off 24 VAC power, and sell for about $13 at Home Depot. HD sells the power adapters for about $15 as well.
	The valves have threads that are different from standard garden hose threads, so you’ll need two adapters, one for either end. One male and one female. The friendly people at the ‘Depot can help you find the right ones if you decide to do this yourself.
	Pick up some teflon tape for about $1 while you are there, then wrap all of the threads. I believe the standard is to wrap it three times around.
	Next up is to attached the whole thing to the outdoor faucet. This is a bit different than how its normally used. These valves are mounted in a box in the ground and mounted horizontally, not vertically like this. It works fine though.
	I have two different bed groups that I need to water, and they all get watered at the same time, so I installed a splitter. Here I’m testing with a small flow of water to make sure there are no leaks. I also tested with the splitter closed but the faucet on full blast to test the set up under pressure. I let it sit like this for half an hour or so and it was bone dry.
	I happened to have lucked out because I have a power outlet right next to the faucet. I’m not sure if its such a good idea, so I’m going to move the power supply to the inside of the garage (which is what’s on the other side of that wall) just to be safe, but for testing this worked well. The little white box is an X10 Appliance Module that allows me to turn all of my irrigation systems on and off by either remote or on computer controlled schedule.

On the other ends of these garden hoses are t-tape irrigation drip hoses. Like the title says, this is phase 1. The next phase will be run underground PVC sprinkler pipes down to the different beds for permanent placement. With the garden hoses you have to remove them every time you mow the yard, so the underground pipe is really the only way to go. You could bury the hose I guess, but I doubt it would last more than a couple of winters. PVC is the right way to do it. I’ll do up a post on that when I can get it done in the next few weeks.

I’ve been meaning to create a 3rd and 4th raised bed for a while now. I only have room for 2 squash plants in my existing beds, so the 3rd bed is needed.. and the 4th.. well, who ever has empty beds??

I decided to snap a few photos of the process. My first beds were made with 2x8s in 10 foot by 4 foot lengths. 2x8s are expensive though.. upwards of $20 per cedar board at home depot. I don’t have that kind of money at the moment, so I went searching for some cheaper options. I want to keep it untreated and organic though.. so cedar is really my only option. Previously I went with 2x8s to hold up to what I thought would be a lot of weight holding the soil. Well, uncompacted soil only 8” deep don’t really put much weight on the sideboards.. so I found some untreated cedar fencing for $1.30 per 5 foot. I picked up 6 of them for less than $10 total. \

	Here they are sitting in my garage. These are 1”x5”x5’, six total.
	I cut the two end boards to 4’ length to give me a matching size of 10’  x 4’.
	I laid them out beside my existing beds and started to till the sod with my shovel, as I don’t have a tiller.
	I’m pretty new to this whole thing, so I figured instead of getting rid of the existing sod and the dirt attached to it, I’d just ‘turn over’ the sod and then add a compostable mulch layer over it to kill the grass, and eventually it would break down and I’d have nice soil.
	What ‘compostable mulch’ did I use? Old newspaper!
	Then topped off with a few bags of purchased garden soil. I need a few more bags to fill the bed. I’ll pick those up in the next day or two and have it all ready for early June squash planting. So.. will the newspaper kill off the grass or will this bed turn into a raised sod bed? I dunno.. time will tell.
	UPDATE 7-27-2009 The newspaper mulch worked great! Here is the bed a few months later, and as you can see it is doing spectacular. None of the grass underneath came through, and no weeds came up either. The tomatoes are pushing over 4 feet tall and have a well developed root system. I call this a total success.