On Saturday, I dragged our lawnmower out of the garage, fired it up, and realized that it was Not Okay. The edges of the deck directly behind the rear wheels had finally rusted through so that the box surrounding the blade had lost its structural rigidity (think of a cardboard box where you’ve run a knife up two of the edges: it won’t stand up anymore). When I tried to turn it the box would warp and the blade would ping-PING-PING the side of the deck. Not exactly what I want happening 2 feet from my ankles. We’ve had the lawnmower for 15 years, so it doesn’t owe us anything, and considering I bought it for $150 I’d say we got our value out of it. The engine still runs fine, for fuck’s sake. Maybe I can make a go-kart out of it? Or a generator…
When I got through with that, I cleaned up the yard and then brought a socket set out to the back wall of the greenhouse. We haven’t used the greenhouse for years, and it’s really been bugging me lately. I’ve been trying to find a replacement door kit for it but just don’t know what I’m looking for, how it would install, or how much it might cost, so I finally figured the hell with it and unscrewed the panel edges to take the center section of polycarbonate twin wall down. That wasn’t so hard.
There. With an assist from a cheap Home Depot fan, that should get us enough airflow to keep the white mold from growing. I cleaned up the mess inside, threw a bunch of old crap out, leveled the tables and got them ready for some vegetables. My irrigation system still works but I need to get some larger mister heads for the near side and a new hose bib to replace the cracked one outside. I’ve got some plans drawn for two wood-frame chicken wire doors to cover the openings. They will get built this weekend. Then, I need five new rubbermaid bins, a pile of dirt, and some vegetables.
I spent all day Monday wading through a thick pea soup of exhaustion because I didn’t get enough sleep the night before, so my lovely bride made me go to bed at 9:30. It’s amazing what a difference a full night’s sleep has on my brain function.
In a quick weekend recap, our neighbor stopped over with a big smile and a truckload of used brick he no longer needs; I’m happy to have some free supplies and he’s happy to be able to get into his garage again. A little back-of-the-envelope guestimating places their number at or near 500. I’m not sure how far this might get us, but I have high hopes it’s enough to reach the sidewalk from our front door. That project, however, is one for the future.
Next up is the greenhouse, where my tomatoes (farthest bin) are getting taller by the second, the cukes, peppers and radishes planted from seed are going bananas, the eggplant are holding steady, and the second batch of tomatoes seem to be digging in. I still haven’t bought that fan I was yammering on about, but nature will force my hand in another couple of weeks and I’ve got to figure something out.
In other eco-conscious news, we are now signed up for two years of 100% wind power through an organization called Clean Currents, which makes me feel a little bit better about leaving the porch lights on at night. We’ve changed a lot of our bulbs over to compact fluorescents and always had lights on timers, but knowing we’re buying clean power from wind energy (and saving a half a cent per KWh) is a good feeling.
That’s about all I got right now; I’ve put off posting this for three days thinking I would inject some humor or clever writing, but that hasn’t happened, and it’s now Wednesday. Enjoy!
This is the opening shot in what I hope will be a successful battle to make our greenhouse productive and useful. I’ve got a source for a temperature-controlled fan to add air circulation ( and hopefully pollination) throughout; the plan is to add more tomatoes, eggplant, peppers, cucumbers and radishes.
Just so I don’t lose the damn bookmark again, here’s a store featuring misting systems, water sprinklers, & mist and irrigation supplies. I’ve ordered from this vendor before and had great service.
This morning I made myself late to work. I threw my stuff in the Jeep, kissed my wife goodbye, and walked around the back of the house to water our fledgling vegetable garden. Along the way, I had to replant several gladiola bulbs in their pots, due to our local squirrels digging for treasure, and carry the pots into the greenhouse for safekeeping. The vegetables all look healthy and good so far. Two eggplants have recovered from their move—I thought I was going to lose one for a day or so, but it perked right back up yesterday. The tomatoes all look healthy and happy. (Strangely, one variety recommends “damp soil” and the other asks for “daily watering”.) The red and green peppers are both looking strong.
Oddly enough, though, the thing that makes me happiest is that the cucumbers, which I planted from seed, are germinating well. I use a watering can to reach the back of the greenhouse, and the first slug of water washed the soil off the top of one of the hills I made. Tucked in together were five or six seeds, all sprouting sucessfully. I covered them back up and watered the rest of the plot, thinking about home-grown tomato and cucumber salad for dinner in August.
Next up is to get another plastic tub like the one I have (I’m using one of those under-the-bed storage containers drilled with drainage holes) and plant my pole beans.
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In other geek news, I converted one of the interior pages on my main site to a mixture of about 75% CSS and 25% old-skool table-based layout. This has been something that’s brewing for a long time, and I’m pretty happy with the results. When all is said and done, the page size will have decreased by about half, the style sheets will be consolidated, and the information will be updated (I only go up to 2003 on the design page—har har) Unfortunately it blows up in IE6. There’s also an issue with Mozilla and my popup script that I haven’t deciphered yet, and some other niggling issues to be addressed. But the heavy lifting has been done, thank God.
This weekend I took advantage of the lousy overcast weather to completely strip and re-cover our greenhouse.
As you can see, it was nasty with a capital “N”. Years of mold and dirt were stuck on the outside and in between the sheets of plastic.
Once the new plastic was up, the inside of the greenhouse was a completely different place.
I re-arranged the clutter and set up our tables so that there’s one whole dry side and one irrigated side. During the rain on Saturday, I cemented the piping together and drilled holes for the sprinkler. This afternoon we finally got to test it out—everything works great. I have to drill another length of pipe with a smaller bit and adjust the pattern for better coverage, but everything works as advertised. (there’s water dripping in this photo:)
Now I’m too tired to write anything else. Oh, yeah, we bought about $300 worth of plants. More on that later.
I pride myself on being a very DIY sort of fellow. It’s a perverse sort of pride sometimes. Most people, given the right set of five tools, a short, well-designed instruction sheet, and an afternoon free of interruption, can do stuff like replace a toilet tank valve or install a GFCI outlet in their kitchen. I tend to take this crap to extremes, though, like building and installing my own arbor (Try this sometime: lift a 13-foot 2×6″ pressure-treated beam on a ladder fourteen feet in the air by yourself. Now repeat that six more times. Watch out for that high-voltage electrical line), transporting four sheets of drywall on the roof of a Ford Taurus (transporting drywall is hard with two people and a pickup truck) or gutting and rehabbing the only functioning bathroom in my house (that was a smelly month.)
Most of this stuff wouldn’t be necessary if I could afford certain things, like, say, a Toyota Tacoma. Or the day rate of a local plumber. Or even some of the hourly charges at the local rent-a-center. Often times there’s a tradeoff between what it would cost to have somebody come in and do the stuff I need vs. eating, and sometimes it’s even more extreme than that (our kitchen rehab estimate comes to mind here.)
It was a no-brainer, though, to have a fellow come in yesterday and haul away the huge pile of brush we’ve been collecting between the greenhouse and the garage. I normally would have called a friend in and paid him happily to help me haul it away, but I decided that he probably wouldn’t appreciate the poison ivy either. Hopefully I won’t have to do any more radical pruning jobs like I did last fall—which is where the brushpile came from—although the holly tree needs a major haircut and the gnarled fruit tree in the side yard appears to have finally kicked off. (And I’d love to chop that nasty cedar tree right down, too.)
While he was stuffing the back of his truck with my skin-irritating brush, I replaced the first of four panels on the greenhouse with new UV plastic. The job went pretty quickly and easily, which was a relief. I also tested out a few different solutions for the water piping and settled on a row of small drilled holes instead of the misting nozzles; the amount of water released seemed to be steadier and covered more area. When he was ready to leave, I helped him toss one of the old rotten picnic tables on top of the load and waved goodbye. He had bagged up all the leaves and raked the area, so we are left with a patch of empty dirt, ready for grass seed where uneven weeds used to lay. I’d say that was $100 well spent.
Jen and I are trading out the cars this week to have oil changes performed and routine maintenance finally performed. This means I got to scoot into work in Jen’s Saturn, which features standard shift and a sunroof. A couple of years ago, I had a functional standard-shift convertible, and driving Jen’s car always makes me homesick for the Scout. The other day I was driving home in the Jeep with the windows down, and some strange confluence of scents on the air reminded me of driving on the beach. I immediately thought about Assateague, and had the idea to take Jen camping on the beach again before the summer heat and bugs move in. We have a bunch of commitments in the middle of May to attend to, but I’m going to shoot for a long weekend sometime that month to smell salt air and camp smoke again. Time to dig out our camping gear and take inventory…
In the small amount of downtime I’ve had today, I’ve been doing some preliminary reading on starting seeds from scratch. It appears we’ve missed the recommended window by a month or so, but I don’t think that will hurt anything in the long run. Most of the plumbing is roughed in as of last night, so I’m just waiting on the plastic and the final fittings from the greenhouse supply company. I’ve set the whole thing up so that we can attach and detach different piping based on what’s growing underneath, and there’s an inside fitting roughed in for a hose attachment and the valves to support it. I also found a downspout diverter for the rain barrels; this will get hooked up to the gutters I’m going to be installing on the garage and routed into the greenhouse piping system, so that we have a natural gravity-fed watering solution.
I hustled myself in to the doctor’s office early on Saturday morning to see somebody about the posion ivy. Since Thursday, the itch had expanded further to areas I hadn’t noticed before: down my right leg and across the hipbone, in the webbing between my left index and middle finger (precursor to the dreaded Blister Fingers), and up and down my right arm, which was already resembling the flesh-eating virus. I met with a kindly Italian doctor and he quickly prescribed some Prednisone (cough be damned) and some topical skin cream, which has the consistency of axle grease. (this was, however, the easiest and quickest doctor’s visit I’ve ever had; in 45 minutes I had been treated and was driving home with my prescription.)
Jen and I have been planning out our priorities over the next couple of months, trying to sock away money for various projects around the house. Command Decision Number One was giving up on the IKEA bed until Jen gets her back and nerve issues worked out. I’m going to have to strap it to the roof of the Jeep and try to return it this week without taking flight on the Beltway—big fun. The floors downstairs have climbed back to priority one; with our tax return and a little boost from our bank accounts, we’ve got enough to cover the first floor and stairs. Next up is our often-dreamed-of anniversary trip, which we’ve been putting off thinking about until, well, we hit the lottery. We decided to scale back the dream trip to Italy and think modestly. Doing a little research online, we found a preplanned seven-day bed-and-breakfast tour through Ireland and plane fare for less than half the cost of a trip to Venice, and decided to go for that instead.
My ability to do any heavy lifting outside is still curbed by the creeping crud, so we took Saturday afternoon to look at plants and start planning our yard for the year. I bought a bunch of PVC and roughed in the basics of the irrigation system in the greenhouse yesterday, and had the chance to meet another set of neighbors behind us (the ones who just put an immense addition on to the back of their house, and who were gracious enough to give me the tour.)
I’d better get over this stupid rash soon, because the weather is much better now, and I have a ton of work to do around the house before it gets too hot.
I’ve been dreaming of using our greenhouse for actual growing purposes ever since we stood out in the backyard and saw it for the first time. When we inspected it, I knew it would need a lot of work. The owners had left us a pair of rain barrels, one potting table, a selection of clay and plastic pots, and one empty greenhouse with a busted heating fan, questionable electrical system, and half-disconnected irrigation pump. Being a closet engineer, I’ve been dying to get to work on this, and Jen has been wanting to use it for growing stuff since last spring.
Since move-in day we’ve cleaned it up and found that the electrical system works fine—the flourescent lights need new bulbs and possibly new ballast—but the irrigation system made no sense. As far as I can tell, there’s a weird pump above the door which used to be hooked up to a water line which then pumped water between the two sheets of plastic which cover the greenhouse. It’s either that, or it vented something out into the air…but I can’t tell how or what.
Update: I think I finally figured it out. It’s an air pump, and it used to inflate the layer of air between the two sheets of plastic. Somehow, I guess, this increased the R value of the structure and kept things warmer.
The heater is still powered, but makes a frightening screech when it’s turned on. It sounds like a rusted or thrown bearing.
Last weekend I took a closer look at the outside of the structure and found out how the plastic is kept in place. It’s a simple tension system, where the plastic is fed into a channel on the frame, and a long strip of aluminum is then fitted into the channel over top, then gently tapped into place. They then sealed it with pounds of silicone caulk, which will have to be removed, but that’s a small matter.
Today, because we’re not getting hammered by income taxes, I took some of my IRS money and ordered a bunch of stuff: four lengths of UV-rated greenhouse plastic, a trio of 1 GPH misting nozzles and their respective PVC fittings, a hose-to-PVC connector, and a drain valve. My original idea was to use copper and PVC together, and drill small holes in a length of 1/2 PVC to mist, but I decided to spend an extra $15 to test out how the nozzles work. The rest of the PVC is off-the-shelf stuff, and should be another $20 or so. It should be here next week, and I’ll keep you up to date on the progress.