2 questions:

1. How is all this hard work happening during Peter's back surgery recovery?

2. How are you going to irrigate the container plants? I find that I never water mine enough, and only have like four. Do you have a little drainage canal in the container greenhouse now?

The answer to (1) is Maryellen, Aleda, and Cornelia. I am now six weeks out from my surgery, which is enough to do some light/moderate putzing around, but the heavy lifting has been done by others. Specifically, Aleda spent a day getting those soil filled tubs in the greenhouse.

The answer to (2) is yet to be determined. Watering could definitely turn out to be the achilles heel of the container system. For a while I was going to run a line of black poly pipe down the rows, on top of the containers, punch little holes at each container, and let it leak into the container. Kind of like a homemade drip irrigation system. But now I am worried I won't have enough water pressure with out little greenhouse sap tank/sump pump systmem, to get water all the way down the line. The alternative is to get a real drip irrigation system, which may be what we end up doing. But we have never let a lack of knowledge or experience stop us from forging ahead here at Old Shaw Farm! So in the plants go, and hopefully we will figure something out for the water!

As an interim option, might consider plugging an adjustible drip emitter into each of your proposed black poly tubing holes. That way you could adjust the flow of each emmitter and possibly keep enough pressure/flow for the end of the line.

http://www.dripdepot.com/cgi-bin/drip/1104.html?id=9MUZwvfC

Bingo. Thanks JDAZ. That is exactly what we need. I knew the answer was going to be some type of modified drip system, but I don't know much about drip irrigation, so I didn't know how to build a homemade system. I guess this is the year to learn more about drip irrigation!