What’s in your soil? In the comments, snap a photo of a handful of the closest organic growing matter you have access to and tell us why it’s alive. It doesn’t matter if it’s a soil mix, native dirt, compost, mulch, etc. Whatcha got groovin’ and growin’ on in there?

Round # 2 with the artichokes!!

I'm a home gardener and I like a variety of fruits and veggies. Plus I grow a ton of herbs. This year I really expanded my gardening space and keeping it watered would be quite dauting without my watering setup. Part of this was my husband's idea and part was mine. The first picture shows my manifold and my timer. The manifold is attached to the side of our back deck. It's all brass (including the on/off valves) and takes a single hose and splits it off to 4 outlets. From the left I have - timer, motion activated sprinkler, short hose with sprayer, long hose with sprayer. The longer hose reaches the back of the property line for times when I need to water my compost pile, the shorter one is what I use to water new seeds and my mint beds (in grow bags to contain the spread) and asparagus bed. The timer has 3 independent watering zones. One goes to my raised beds and the jasmine that I planted last year (it runs along two sides of our shed). The second one goes to a small sprinkler for my potato bags, and the third one goes to my in ground beds. The hoses for the raised beds and in ground beds are soaker hoses that have been buried just under the mulch about an inch below the soil surface. With the 3 zones on the timer I'm not trying to water everything at the same time. Plus I can control how often each area gets watered. Right now the potato bags get water every other night and the beds are every 4 days. I just set this up so I'll be adjusting it as I see how often it truly needs to be watered. The potato bags dry out faster, that's why they get watered frequently. I'm pretty sure I'll be adjusting the raised beds and in ground beds to not be watered as often, but it was a bit dry, so I started with a more frequent schedule. I'm thinking that the raised beds might need water more often than the in ground beds. We'll see.