Garden Update: Everything is Hopping

I mentioned in a previous blog this amazing device, the solar powered watering system.  Finally, FINALLY, it arrived in the mail and now I'll rave about it with photos.

Here you can see the pots on the garage wall that have baby strawberries and the some of the tomatos I grew from seedlings.  Those are more tomatos in pots on the ground. You can see a solar panel attached to the fence in the back, and a bucket with an orange lid that has water with a bit of of fertilizer dissolved into it.  One black wire going into the bucket is a water level sensor that triggers an alarm if the water level gets too low, and the other is the intake, sucking up water into the device.  Then, from the device, another tube runs toward the plants.  Then the tube goes to a two-way splitter--one tube going on to the neighboring pot and the other into a little needle that drip drops water into the dirt.

Close up of the bucket, sensor and the intake tube with a filter to keep leaves and crud out.

Close up of the solar panel--about 4" by 6".

Close up of a pot with a tube dripper going to the roots.  You can just sort of see the splitter between the two pots.

Here is the back of the gadget, which has the controls.  It's super easy to use.  The on/off is the upper left.  Once you turn it on, it stays on until you turn it off.  Then you hit the hour button: do you want it to run every 12, 24, 48, 72 or 96 hours?  I was worried and selected 12 hours, but that is too much. Now that the roots are soaked, I am going to back off to every 48 hours.  The 'min' button is to determine how long it will run: 3, 5, 10, 15, or 20 minutes.  I picked 5 minutes.  If I reduce the frequency, that will probably be just right. The "in" is where the tube from the bucket goes in, and the out is the tube heading off to the first plant.  Running for 5 minutes uses about 1/3 of a 5 gallon bucket and waters 17 plants.  So, you can do the math at this point. In theory, I could set this up to a GIANT cattle watering trough and go on a vacation for months.

I bought a load of dahlia tubers in March.  They finally kicked in and are growing leaves, but no buds yet.  I thought there'd be flowers by now...As long as I dig these up before mid-October, in theory, they'll be bigger and better next year.  

The watermelon hammocks arrived.  They are a bit big at this point but you get the idea. I think these stripey melons are the ones that can grow to 20 or so pounds, which is a bit alarming.   

These dark green ones with no stripes are mini melons, I think, like the size of cantalopes.  But I wasn't paying attention once I planted the things and threw away the plant labels. That's the gardening version of "Techno Joy" that Eddie Izzard talks about in a concert from about 30 years ago.

How are other things doing?  The tomatoes shot up about 2' in the past two days. They all have little flowers and even a few have sort of ratty looking green tomatos on them.

Here is one I found: 

And the mystery vine shot up, too, after the unexpected rainstorm we had last night.  Now it's over 6' tall between the beds.

About 8' tall along the fence:

As is making a break into the backyard of our neighbor, Raphael. If I see him I'll have to let him know he's free to keep whatever he gets over there. The stone wall top is the highway for the gopher family.  I think they live under that small building, which is Raphael's tool and lawnmower shed.