After my post about the critters eating my tomatoes, Renie and Mom both texted me within a half an hour of each other to tell me of a homemade method: fill a 5-gallon bucket 2/3 with water, sprinkle sunflower seeds over the top of the water, and add a ramp for the varmints to get in. Once they fall in they can’t get out.
Last night the two homemade bucket traps did not yield any corpses but I got another field mouse in the black commercial trap. It looks like one of the black traps is more sensitive than the other, because I’m consistently yielding one dead varmint per two traps. However, no tomatoes gave their lives overnight, which is good because two of the Paul Robesons are nearing ripeness.
So, Bill 1, Chipmunks, 1.
Both Renie and Mom got in touch with me inside one hour of the previous post about a dastardly way to kill chipmunks: Fill a 5 gallon bucket 2/3 full of water, and scatter sunflower seeds across the top of the water. Add a board up to the lip like a ramp: they jump in but can’t get out. Finley and I will be making a Home Depot run on the way home from camp to set two of these up this evening.
I found a black pair of Ray-Ban 4115’s on Amazon this afternoon and ordered them after making sure my local optometrist could cut lenses for them (which they are now doing). I’d really prefer the tortoiseshell but they have stopped production of those frames altogether, so I guess I’m lucky to get what I’m getting. Either way, I can’t survive without sunglasses and my old pair hasn’t turned up anywhere. Now I’ve got to find some replacement eyeglasses.
It’s official: The Scout is now insured through Hagerty, a specialty insurance company that caters to classic vehicles. What this means is that there’s excellent injury and damage coverage, as well as a guaranteed replacement price for the Scout in case something catastrophic happens. I insured her for the average going price for a Scout in Good condition (this is the East Coast, after all) so if the unthinkable happens they will cut me a Big Fat Check, I can find another one in roughly the same condition, and buy it outright.
The critters have realized there’s food in the greenhouse, even if it’s stuff they don’t like. I’ve noticed chipmunks darting through the corners when I walk in, and there’s a new hole in the dirt someone has made for quick escapes. As usual, they will climb up to the ripest tomato and chomp a few bites out of it before realizing, hey, I don’t like this. Then they will move on to the next ripest tomato and do the same thing. Incensed, I went out and bought a couple of rat traps (because size matters) and some of those electronic high-frequency emitters. After installing those I used a couple of Giant Destroyers to nuke the hole. I’ll have to order more and just keep smoking them out.
At the risk of this blog devolving into Bill’s Poop Watch, I’ll give you a final update on the workings of my GI tract (because that is all I’m thinking about right now): I think I had the last of the IV poops last night, which is a blessing. During my stay in the hospital they had me hooked up to an IV called a TPN, which looks like milk and apparently contains all of the vitamins, minerals, fatty acids, and other stuff that helps keep a patient alive when they can’t actually eat food. They added extra potassium to this, because apparently I was low, and I can say from experience that potassium hurts going in–and hurts worse coming out. This was further amplified by my GI tract expelling stomach acid the only place it could. So in the ranking schema, IV nutrition poops are slightly below chemo poops in terms of comfort. Especially when they’re happening every two hours.
It was great to sleep in my own bed but three weeks of getting used to rock-hard hospital beds completely fucked up my back. And the hospital schedule screwed up my circadian rhythm so I had to double-dose myself with melatonin to get to sleep before 11PM. Plus, I was stupid and decided to sleep with the windows open so I suffered through 100% humidity last night and got lousy sleep. Tonight I will set the A/C on “meat locker” and hopefully enjoy better rest.
Meanwhile, I’m a weak, achy mess. My conditioning is completely gone so I’m huffing and puffing up stairs and struggling to rise from my knees to a standing position. I’m popping ibuprofen every four hours to keep my joints from exploding. With that in mind, this morning I put my laptop in my backpack and walked down the street to Atwater’s to treat myself to another cup of decaf and a blueberry muffin as a reward for jabbing a needle of blood thinner into my leg without screaming. They have me on Enoxaparin, which calls for a subcutaneous injection into the stomach or other fatty tissue to prevent blood clots. My body fat index was low before I was in the hospital wasting away to nothing; I’m probably hovering somewhere above “skeleton” and just below “starvation” on the charts at this point. Months ago I had to administer these shots after cancer and gave up on it (when I actually had more fat) because the medicine would shoot out of my skin in a stream the moment I pulled the needle out. Why they can’t let me just take my goddamn Eliquis, I don’t know.
It was Prime day while I was laid up in Delaware, so I scrolled through the deals and found a great one on a Hero Session to replace the Hero 3 I’m selling with the drone. I used a couple of Sessions when I was in Colombia and found them very easy to use, so I’m familiar with the drawbacks and advantages of the model. I also scored a new HD Fire for Jen to replace her 3-year-old model. Unfortunately at some point my Moleskine ingested a cupful of water while on my bedside tray at the hospital and became completely ruined (as well as smelling like SHIT) so I had to reorder another one to replace it.
As mentioned in Instagram, during my absence the tomatoes in the greenhouse went absolutely nuts. And the cucumbers! I’d set up a drip hose on a timer before leaving for the beach to water everything for 15 minutes at 6AM every morning. Apparently this made everything happy, because almost all of the plants were bent double under the weight of all the fruit. The cherry plants are absolutely covered with fruit; I’d say four times the amount before we left. Even the balky heirloom plants are heavy with fruit now; I had to plant Jen’s 7′ tomato cages in the ground next to the tubs and lift the bent stalks to rest on top of each.
It’s all gotten too leggy to cut back, so we’ll just have to ride out August the way things are. I’ve got to go back out and prune everything way back (after I’d propped everything up my bowels were rumbling) and do some maintenance, but HOLY SHIT. I can’t believe it. My head is already spinning with plans for next spring–moving the tables to the center, reconfiguring the drip hoses, changing up some of the varieties, and seeing what else might grow in there.
I took a chance last weekend and ordered a used Airport Extreme base station to replace the one that got fried in the flood/storm a few weeks ago. I bought it on Amazon’s marketplace and hoped for the best. It arrived this evening and within about 5 minutes it was up and running in place of the old one in our living room. Immediately I noticed an improvement in the speed of our wireless network; the wireless router in the basement is just too old and slow to keep up with us. This will likely be the last inexpensive Apple router I ever buy, as they have just exited the marketplace completely (for reasons I still don’t understand).
I’ve got a few more tomatoes blooming in the greenhouse, but not as many as I’d like to see at this point (and for all the pollinating I’ve been doing). I’m sure bees do it better but I’ve been showing those plants some sexxxxy times and I’ve only got fruit on three of the six plants. Maybe I need to talk dirty to them. The cukes are just beginning to bloom as well, so in another day or so I can start pollinating them as well. In the meantime I dug out some old drip hose, switched out the connectors, and looped it around the bins. With a new electric timer it’s set to drip for 30 minutes every morning at 6AM which should be enough water to keep them happy while we’re gone on vacation. I’m testing it out tonight, and then I’ll disconnect it until the day before we leave–both rain barrels are full from the past couple of weeks and I want to keep using that water until it’s gone.
Sunday morning we got up early and headed out to Larriland for some cherry picking. We started in the tart cherry fields because Jen has a lot of baking she wants to do; the trees were absolutely laden with fruit. I’ve never seen cherry trees like that before. Within about a half an hour we had 14 pounds of cherries in two bags. Then we went and picked another 4 pounds of sweet cherries before calling it a day. We’d originally wanted to pick blackberries but the fields were closed Sunday, so hopefully Jen can carve a little time out during the week to go back.
We kicked our asses on the house in the afternoon. I mowed the lawn and then made a small repair to the carb on my gas edger, which I haven’t used for two seasons, and got that running again. Thank you internets! With that I cleaned up the backyard, cut way back into the pile of brush my dipshit neighbor has stopped mowing, and made the whole place look better again. We made a trip to Lowe’s and I bought some wood to replace a panel on the front of the garage, which has been rotting away for years, as well as replace the bench seat under Finn’s playset. Jen continued mulching and cleaning the beds, and then sat and pitted cherries until she couldn’t move her hands anymore.
My first tomato is growing ever larger and looking great; there’s no rot or funk on it at all. I’ve also got two new tomatoes starting on a companion plant and many blooms on everything else. I switched a Q-tip out for a small paintbrush to continue pollinating everything manually, in the hope that it will be more effective.
I did some more repairs to the greenhouse and got the irrigation system back online; a new hose bib to replace the UV-cracked original, and five new 5GPH misters over the tomatoes for backup watering are now in place. But what I’ve been reading is that overhead watering isn’t good for tomato plants–it will promote disease. This isn’t a problem, because I planned for drip irrigation when I put the misting system in years ago, so it’s just a matter of switching my hoses around.
The tomatoes themselves are all doing very well. I restaked and tied all of them because they’ve grown 6″ in a week with no sun, and there are blooms on all but one–there’s even a tomato! I’ve got to go out and manually pollinate them all, and then pinch off the new growth to keep all of the energy in the fruit.
Finn and I snuck out in the Scout during some sunshowers and picked up two more containers, three cherry tomato plants, and more potting soil to start covering the second bench in back. I have to split out the cucumbers into a second container because they’re getting leggy and crowded.
We saw a matinee of Solo: a Star Wars Story on Saturday and the whole family really enjoyed it. Jen made a good observation that in their initial scenes the actors playing Solo and Calrissian did an excellent job of imitation, and then dialed it back for the rest of the movie up until the end. It was subtle but very well done. The story seems to be that it’s a bomb (compared to other Star Wars movies) but I honestly don’t see why.
I got a $7 rebuild kit in the mail for my Plomb ratchet on Friday and couldn’t wait to see if it would work. Disassembly was pretty easy, aided by some PBlaster to loosen up years of crust, and all the guts of the ratchet fell out easily. I found a YouTube link for a rebuild and within about 5 minutes had the old parts cleaned and new parts installed.
The one roadblock was understanding how to attach the selection lever to the cam inside the ratchet, but I read somewhere that you’ve got to use a ball-peen hammer to mushroom the top of the cam nub over the lever. Once I’d done that I used some heavy duty gear oil to lube the whole thing and buttoned it back up. Now it’s ready for another eighty years of service in my toolbox.
This shot was taken about 4 hours before the rain started falling. It’s a beautiful afternoon in the yard, and I’d just dug through the basement to find my old Tonka trucks for Bear and Finn to play with in the sandbox. Jen had Ruby on a blanket next to them, and I left them to run out to Mariottsville for some tolls I was buying from Bennett. As I pulled out of the driveway, Jen was on her back lifting Ruby into the air, and a light sprinkle hit the windshield.
I took the day off today to finish up post-flood recovery. The basement is pretty clean. There’s still water around the edges of some low-laying tile, and the ice room still has a wet spot on the floor. It’s hard to dry out in 100% humidity. The Scout is loaded with a pile of trash waiting to go to the dump, and I could probably throw out more. I’ve got a bunch of stuff I’m going to Freecycle in the ice room and some stuff in the garage that needs to go, too. Maybe this weekend…
After I’d cleaned up as much as I could clean up in the house, I got to work on the greenhouse. I’d patched up some of the holes in the plastic a couple years ago, but time and weather did their thing and they all took a beating. I peeled the old stuff off, washed the plastic (it was filthy) and applied new patches to make it water tight again. I moved the old rickety water barrel platform to the back outside corner of the greenhouse and used my wort chiller pump (it’s still alive!) to transfer all the water in the barrel under the garage to a spare barrel up on the platform. Then I reconfigured some hoses to reach inside the greenhouse so there’s on-demand water available for the plants. We also moved them to the corner nearest the house to get maximum light. They all look pretty happy so far, although there really hasn’t been any sun since they were planted.
Then I started organizing my new toolbox. It’s a heavier-duty unit than the one I already had out there but a little smaller, so I got creative with organization. I inherited a ton of new crescent wrenches with the box, a lot of miscellaneous tools, and a bunch of crap socket sets. I’m going to give the old toolbox to Glenn, who doesn’t have one, for his garage.
The compressor I bought is a used Craftsman 25 gal. electric unit, in good shape, but with a ratty hose. When I get past the camping trip I’m going to pick up a cheapo Harbor Freight sandblasting kit and try cleaning up some of the spare parts I’ve got. It’s good to have air out there, though, because now I can get some air tools to make things go faster.
One of the things Bear did for me while he was here was inspect our tent, which turns out to be too small for three people. I found a Coleman 4-person tent with good reviews on Amazon, and put that in my shopping cart along with some glow sticks, flashlights for the kids, and a beginner’s tackle box among other items. There are two weeks to go for our camping trip, and I’m slowly assembling the stuff we’ll need.
The girls and I went to the Baltimore Herb Festival today, where I picked up six heirloom tomato plants for the greenhouse experiment. I spent about $40 on dirt and containers at Lowe’s and planted them two to a tub. Hopefully that will be enough space and soil for them to grow comfortably.
In the fourth tub I stuck a bunch of cucumber shoots, in the hope that three or four of them will take off and produce something. Jen tells me I need to split them out further. I want to hedge my bets with some hybrid plants, so we’ll be going back to Lowe’s for more containers and dirt sometime this weekend, and I can get another container to divide the cukes up even further.
After that was done, I ordered 10 new misting heads for the irrigation system because the ones I bought 13 years ago are, well, 13 years old and mostly drip instead of mist. The hose bib is shot so I bought two of those as well. I placed a rain barrel under the corner of the garage but I need to set the other one up under the back corner of the house to really collect as much water as possible.
The next thing I’ve got to learn how to do is to keep the tomato plants from getting too big and not focusing on producing fruit. In years past they just got tall and waited until November to bother with giving us anything worth eating, but that was because I wasn’t on top of them every day. This year I resolve to visit them every day and make sure they are happy.