Starting the 2015 garden

I know, seems like an over abundance of optimism on my part to be starting the garden in mid January,

but the fact is, we've been feeding off of last fall's Nevada Lettuce all winter. They're getting a little ragged now, mostly because we've been pulling leaves off to the point where some of the plants are more stem than anything else, but they held up well.

We also had some Simpson Lettuce growing along side but they insisted on bolting between Thanksgiving and Christmas no mater how aggressive I was on topping off the flower stems. Once bolted the leaves of the Simpson got pretty bitter but I did leave two of them growing to see if I could get any seed out of them, (Not so far.) and both lettuces sailed through the several freezes we've had with only a few layers of floating row cover for protection.

Just for grins, late in the fall I direct planted a few Early Green Broccoli seeds in an empty spot. (For those that just turned their noses up, and you know who your are, we eat a lot of broccoli at our house. Like pretty much every day!) It was quite late in the season and a bit cold for proper germination, but this plant, which hasn't set any florets yet, sprouted then thrived despite the cold.

So I maybe got a little impatient the other day but I ended up planting a flat with radishes, a couple more broccoli, and some Nevada lettuce and set it on a heat pad under the grow light out in the barn. Within two days the lettuce had sprouted and by the next day everybody was up and growing.

So I started a second flat with Dwarf Blue Kale, Brandywine Tomatoes, and just for grins, a couple Contender Bush Beans. A few days later everybody is up.

In our zone (8) the lettuce, kale, broccoli and radishes are all considered cool weather plants which means by mid to late May they will be done, so starting them now isn't that far off the mark. The tomatoes will take a little nursing to get them through to planting time but they too suffer in the heat so a good head start will hopefully improve yield.

The beans?? Well this photo was taken one day after the first of the two beans sprouted (The other one sprouted last night.) and it's that tall plant over on the left. As you can see it has some pretty well developed true leaves on it just one day after sprouting! I'll be transplanting them into larger pots later today but I may have jumped the gun a bit on the beans!!

In a couple weeks I'll probably repeat the plantings. This way if I've been too early with some of these initial plantings all is not lost, and if I wasn't too early we will have an extended harvest to look forward to.

An Ivy League Project

OK, maybe I should have left off that 'league' bit and just claimed it to be an an Ivy Project. (Was that mean of me to tease all you East coast college sports fans and/or intellectual snobs like that?. . . Too bad.)

I'm not very clear on just where they came from (I guess I wasn't in the loop that day.) but I ended up with a couple small Ivy plants sitting on my computer desk/shelf/standup workstation the other day. It was suggested that I find a proper pot and keep them at my station for a little greenery since I have the 10'x10' doors behind me open most the time and get fairly good light there. Being a husband of nearly 30 years (This time; the first marriage didn't work out quite so well. . .) I took that suggestion as a command and immediately looked around for something to put the poor little plants into.

Of course there's never an appropriate pot just hanging around with nothing to do when you need one is there?!

I mean I could have put the forks on the tractor and drug (I know, now days dragged is more correct but I'm not from these days.) that 24" ceramic planter in from beside the barn; you know, the one so heavy I can't even tip it up on edge and roll it without causing serious bodily harm; like the kind where my guts pop out and get stepped on; but I kind of doubt that my tall baker's rack was really built for that kind of load anyway, and I'm pretty sure the two small plants would be lost and lonely with all that acreage.

So I wandered down the hill to the equipment barn (One of those inexpensive tensioned-skin 'garages') where I have a stack of old cedar fence boards salvaged when the 20 year old fence they were once part of had to be replaced. Grabbing a few off the stack I headed back to the workshop

where I did a couple quick 'measurements' and a crude drawing.

Not wanting just a plain old box, I opted to tilt all four sides outward at a 7 degree angle. This particular angle was pretty much an arbitrary selection, except that 5 degrees is small enough that you're not quite sure if it was intentional or just sloppy workmanship, 10 degrees is just too - well - common, more than 10 and it starts looking cartoonish, so 7 it is.

First step is to rip a 7 degree edge down the length of the best looking fence board, ( Best looking in this case means the one with the most interesting aging and edge wear.)

But, Oh NO!!!! My angle gauge is dead! Push the ON button and it just sits there staring back blankly. Push it again and still nothing! Bang it into the palm of my hand and still nothing!

So I managed to waste a couple minutes at this always useless endeavor before accepting that I must have run the battery flat last time I used it.

Fortunately I had a couple spares in the battery box, otherwise I might have had to go old-school. (Oh the horror!!)

That near disaster resolved, I set the blade angle to 83 degrees and ripped my starter edge which will end up being at the bottom of each side.

Then with my miter guide set to 7 degrees I began cross-cutting the fence board into the bits I needed, careful to keep track of that 7 degree edge so it always ended up in the right place; down and outward leaning.

 Of course I managed to make the first cross-cut with the blade still cocked over at 83 degrees instead of the 90 it should have been, so I had to use one of my do-overs to fix that. (Fortunately, since it's my shop and I make the rules, I have as many do-overs as I need; and let's face it, some days are better than others. . .)

With all four sides cut to size I tilted the blade back to 83 degrees and cut a scrap piece of pine so that it would drop into the assembled sides and wedge itself there as a bottom. I used the pine because it will give more structure than the worn out fence boards. (Besides, I have plenty of leftover scraps of it on the lumber rack.) Yes, the pine will rot away faster than cedar but then this is pretty much a throw-away project anyway. If I get any more than two years out of the planter I figure I'm at least a year ahead of the game.

Of course, if this was a carefully planned and measured out endeavor I could have made all the 7 degree cuts with one setup,

but it's often best to measure right off the project pieces as you go and just leave the tape measure alone.

First I ripped the pine to width based on the finished width of the end pieces, then I cross-cut it to the length of the long pieces minus the combined thickness of the two ends.

Clamping the pine base to the workbench as a crude assembly jig, I pinned the four sides together first then finally pinned the bottom board in place. This took all of 2 or three minutes with the air-nailer.

Because this is going to sit on a shelf over top of some of my books, I draped a still folded black trash bag over the planter, tucked it in reasonably well, tacked it in place with some scrap pine strips, making sure to keep them down below what will be the soil level, and finally hacked off the excess trash bag with a blade that could have been just a little sharper, but who has time for that??

Of course I'll have to be very careful not to over-water and rot the roots, but I figure that's better than dribbling dirty plant water down over my books, one of which (Rod McKuen's, Listening to the Warm) I've had since I was a freshman in high school and a few others (A couple hiking guides and Tom Brown's exhaustively titled, Field Guide to Nature Observation and Tracking.) I've had since the early eighties.

A few scoops of potting mix from the bin outside, a little tamping and watering in, and the Ivy has a pretty nice new home, even if I say so myself.

This prototype took about an hour from concept to finish and required less than one fence board. I have over two hundred fence boards in that stack down in the equipment barn and with a few jigs and some assembly line production I figure I could turn out 6 or so planters an hour at a cost of maybe a buck apiece and they would probably sell for $9.99  over at the crafts and antiques festival as fast as I could make them. Over $50 an hour net isn't bad, but, being retired and all, where's the fun in that!!

My freshly 'greened' workstation, complete with about-to-be-grilled dinner (The grill is just warming up off to the left.) and this very blog entry on the laptop!

The workstation is made up of one full-height and one half-height baker's racks backed up to each other and a goose-neck LED floor lamp for when the barn doors are closed.

Just below the laptop is a 48" 4 bulb florescent shop light I use as a grow light when I have seedlings sitting on the shelf below it. I have room for another grow-light setup below that but for now my keyboard (Music not data entry.) sits down there.

The binoculars and camera are always sitting here, right at hand as well, (Of course the camera is, in fact, in my hand at this moment. . .) as are a number of field guides and other reference books.

The top shelf of the tall rack has a few stray projects sitting on it and the shelf with the new planter is also where I keep a stack of puzzles handy because - well - a guy needs handy puzzles.

It might not look like much but my workstation works out pretty dang well for me and now even has live plants! (I wonder if they'll stay that way. . .)

Our Roomba with a can on his head

I've posted about our iRobot Roomba before and how well engineered this little robotic vacuum is, (We call him Pierre, our little French maid.) but he lives in a pretty harsh environment down there on the raw concrete floor of our living quarters and sometimes things break down.

This time it was the bump-sensors.

He has a bumper wrapped around the front (Yes, even though he's round he does have a front!) with a pair of sensors behind it that can tell when he's run into something and whether it's center, right or left. Then he backs up a little, turns in the appropriate direction, and sets off again on his busy little way. If one of these sensors gets stuck he starts frantically backing up and spinning one way then backing up and spinning the other way, and backing up some more like a cat with it's head stuck inside a Dinty Moore stew can.

If I happened to be around when he started this weird dance a good swift kick on the nose used to sort him out again, (Otherwise he eventually gives up and parks himself wherever he happens to be and waits for us to come back home and trip over him.) but recently no amount of foot-abuse could sort him out. Clearly something has quit doing it's thing and an on-board diagnostic pointed at the left bump-sensor.

Apparently this is not unique to our Pierre because I came up with this web page that walked me step by step through the process of setting him right again.

The first step, getting the cover (Bottom) off and removing the battery is quick and simple, 4 screws and you're there.

After that it starts getting a little more complicated so I got out a small parts bin and, working from left to right, using one bin per step so the parts, mostly screws, didn't co-mingle into a mosh-pit type scenario which I'd never be able to sort out again, I carefully kept things organized.

First he's flipped right-side up and the outer covers are removed

Then the various bits that make up the controls and switches are unscrewed/lifted off 

and the main PCB unplugged, (9 connectors in all) unscrewed and removed, which exposes all the hard-wired bits, including the bump sensors tucked under the cliff sensor assembly. (Which keeps him from falling down the stairs, if we had stairs.)

One of the bump-sensors lifted out and dismantled to it's component parts

Until I got all the way down to the two bump-sensors.

What's missing in the photo above (Hey! I was up to my elbows in Pierre guts and didn't always get back to the camera!) is a little PCB (Printed Circuit Board) that has an infrared emitter on one end and receiver on the other and fits into the housing. If you look close at the bit in the top right of the photo you can see an opening in the curved end of it, a tiny window. Normally the emitter shines infrared rays through this little window and tickles the receiver. When Pierre runs into something the arm moves the window away and the receiver is no longer tickled so knows the robot has run into something bigger than itself and signals for it to back away.

The web site is focused on replacing the emitter and/or receiver on the little PCB since it's usually one of these that causes the problem. (Replacements only cost a couple bucks per set but you have to do the soldering.) Since the sensors are encased in the enclosure which has a dust-seal (The square, ribbed thingy which is rubber) the site holds out little hope that a good cleaning will solve the problem, but apparently they are unfamiliar with concrete dust which will get into everything and anything.

So, a good cleaning, some reassembly

Tiny screws are difficult for fat fingers to retrieve from those little compartments n the parts organizer, but a quick stir with a magnetic pickup solves the problem. Warning! If you lost a screw and can't find it anywhere and you wear glasses that have tiny little magnets for holding the matching sunglasses on, check them for the missing screw!  Ask me how I know this!  Go ahead! Ask!

                                                   and Pierre was back on the job again.

Do-over

Generally speaking, quality craftsmanship means doing the job once, putting up your tools, and being done with it.

When it comes to welding that's not me. . .

 Not quite a year ago I built this cart for hauling the trashcan up to the county road for pickup behind a 4-wheeler. This morning the cart tried to become trash itself when a weld connecting the body of the cart to the towing portion very rudely highlighted the quality of my welding skills.

I briefly considered removing the wood portion of the cart from the steel chassis before affecting repairs, but the very first carriage bolt I attempted to remove in order to make this happen showed a marked tendency to spin in place, so I abandoned that plan.

 Instead I cleaned things up a little with a wire brush, clamped the wandering parts back where they belonged, and grabbed a couple (There's another one on hidden over there on the other side.) of brackets out of my project bin that would hopefully protect the wood bits while I muddled around with a live welding rod.

I think I'm starting to get the mechanics of welding down since this time I didn't blind myself by forgetting to turn the self-darkening shield on or leave any stray scars or burn marks behind by aimlessly waving a live welding rod around,

but clearly I still need help, lots of help, with the actual welding part of the process!!!

As ugly as this looks, the joint survived several blows from a hammer before I tried disguising the mess with a fresh spritz of paint. The last weld survived approximately 45 round trips up to the county road, the counter is ticking for this weld. . .

Rain!!

OK!  According to the rain gauge this has been a very good month for wetness, and around here we like good months for wetness.

Long term average rainfall for November here is 3.36" but this November we pulled down a whopping 8.71", nearly 5 of that in the past 3 days. That puts us 4" over the average annual rainfall with December yet to go. That means that since 2009 when the drought really kicked in we are only down by 17".

But now the sun is back and that's good too!

To celebrate I got the camera out this morning.

This shot proves, despite what some think, that we do in fact have seasons down here in Texas, including a touch of color.

The seasonal changes might be a little more subtle than elsewhere, but then again we don't need a blizzard dumping a couple feet of snow that then hangs around for months to help us appreciate the warmth of a spring morning either. A week or so of freezing nights and daytime highs in the 40's with a stiff north wind will do quite nicely thank you very much!

This is just a lowly well-house, but even the mundane take on a special something in the right light.

And here I was supposed to have a couple photo's taken a little later in the day showing a lone, and very big and scary, snapper sunning itself on the bank at one end of the pond, and way over at the other end, well out of range of being - well - snapped, a taunting clique of various sized box turtles, only I didn't realize until I went to retrieve what arguably might have been the best photos I've ever taken in my life (Of course I have no proof of that but I'm sticking to it.) that the memory card was in the laptop at the time and not in the camera. . .

Sure, when you pull that particular bone-headed stunt a little reminder pops up in the vewfinder; 'No memory card!!'; but it seems to me it would be a simple thing to really idiot proof the whole operation (Because clearly there are real idiots out there!) and just disable the camera when the card isn't in it. . .

Putting the monkey back in the box, at least until next time

I'm way late in getting this posted as the events that follow happened a while ago now, but I'm finally getting around to it.

If you have a good memory you might remember that I was in the middle of a chainsaw job when said chainsaw fell victim to a wrench the dang monkey was throwing around.

Well a few days later I had opportunity to purchase a few feet of the fuel line I needed and shortly after that the chainsaw once again looked like a chainsaw and not a pile of scrap on the corner of my workbench.

Oh boy! I'm supposed to make this back into something?!!!

The new, shiny yellow fuel line in place and ready to go!

My reassembled throttle controls even look like the before photo I took!!

And humpty all put back together again.

Except that the dang thing wouldn't run worth shiitake!! (And not the mushroom kind. . .) In fact it sounded suspiciously like the 4-wheeler that's been sitting in pieces over in a corner of the barn for months now because I can't seem to make it work despite the hours and hours I've put into it.

The dang thing (Chainsaw and 4-wheeler) won't idle at all and when I open the throttle it bogs down and has no power.

Given my track record with things mechanical, and especially things carburetor, I had virtually no hopes of redemption as I tore the chainsaw back down again.

I had gone on line and done some searching and even watched two videos on installing rebuild kits into chainsaw carburetors and got the impression that the people doing things like this don't think it's that big a deal. But then they've never seen me try it!

I had to get the carburetor out to find the brand and model before I could order a rebuild kit and as long as I had it out I went ahead and took it apart.

 What the hell, it already doesn't work. What's the worst I can do? Make it not work even more??

As long as I had it apart I figured I might as well practice putting it back together again. After all, if I can't manage that there's no sense in spending money on a rebuild kit is there!

So I put on some nitrile gloves, grabbed the air-hose, a face shield and a can of carb cleaner and had at it.

Well I don't know if it was pure luck or if I was suddenly channeling an expert mechanic from the great beyond, but after I did all that screwing around with it the dang thing worked!!

Figuring there was a time limit on this good fortune I quickly suited up in my chaps, long-sleeved shirt and face-shielded hardhat and finished cutting the cribbing I needed with my rejuvenated saw!

With that in place I slapped together a crude platform with some scraps of treated lumber I had laying around and stacked my handful of oak rounds on it where I'll let them dry a few months (The tree was already dead so they've got a good head start on drying already.) before splitting into firewood chunks.

Up until this point I was thinking about trading my basket of 4-wheeler for a couple loads of gravel, but now I'm feeling all manly and macho and just bought a brand new can of carb cleaner, so maybe I'll take another crack at it. . .

If nothing else it will slap the manly right back out of me and I've found that carrying around false manly can be a dangerous thing.

The monkey throws a wrench or two

We were up on the hill above our little patio the other day staking out the location of a privacy screen.

We are intensely private people (Others have another, less flattering, way of putting it but we're sticking with intensely private thank you.) and maintain a naturally thick and heavy growth along our fence line to block the view in, but if the weekend neighbors to the north come right up to a particular section of fence-line, and if it's winter when the vegetation is a little sparser, they might be able to get a glimpse or two of our little patio area. So we're going to put a natural cedar-stick screen up there in that band of growth on our side of the fence to make it a little denser.

(When that property to the north went up for sale we intended to buy it to increase our privacy buffer but it was grossly overpriced. While we were waiting for reality to drop the price to something more reasonable some damn fool that should know better (He lives in the city but sells farm insurance in the area so knows the land values.) paid way too much and bought the place out from under us. Not to mention the upward kick that gave all of our property taxes that year!)

The day after we set out the stakes marking the limits of our intended screen we made a run into town. It was a windy day and when we got back we discovered that an old oak had fallen right on top of our stakes!

Wrench One!

Which is exactly why we stay out of the woods on windy days around here! We have lots of Water and Post Oak and when these trees die they get brittle and tend to come down with no warning.

First they shed the larger branches (With a single, sharp crack followed by a thud and believe me, you don't want to be part of that thud as the branch hits the ground!) and eventually the denuded trunk is held up by - well - not much, and a little wind in the right place snaps off what little is left of the root system and down it comes!

As long as we're not underneath it when that happens we can simply clean up the results. In this case, since the wood was still in pretty decent shape I decided to cut it into fireplace sized chunks. Not that we have a fireplace, or even a fire ring, but who knows, someday we might. . .

Of course now I need some sort of wood rack to put the rounds into to keep them dry and rot free until I get around to splitting them. I have several treated 2x10's left over from other projects I can make a platform with, so I drug out a couple of railroad ties we've had laying around for years intending to cut them into cribbing to keep the platform up off the ground. Only the chainsaw that I had just used to cut the tree into rounds decided it wasn't going to work anymore and barely managed one cut.

Wrench Two!

I checked the usual culprits, fresh fuel, chain not binding, pull and clean the plug, but that was just wishful thinking since I had a sinking feeling I knew what the issue was all along.

You see, when I pumped the primer bulb after putting fresh fuel in the saw, I noticed I was getting lots of teeny tiny bubbles and teeny tiny bubbles are not normal! So I drained the fresh fuel back out and did some poking around inside the fuel tank where I found the weighted fuel filter just rattling around loose instead of hanging on the end of the fuel line where it belongs. I fished the end of the fuel line out to where I could see it and found it was split and rotten.

Once again that ridiculously inefficient and environmentally questionable gas-alcohol mix that's been forced on us by well meaning but short sighted environmentalists helped along by savvy agribusiness has bitten me in the ass! Despite draining the fuel tank between uses, the alcohol has still managed to rot the fuel line.

So, forced into the role of mechanic, a role I'm not very well suited for, I started taking lots of pictures and disassembling the saw so I could get in there and replace the fuel lines.

The lines to and from the primer bulb are in pretty good shape, which is a good thing because the one running back into the fuel tank, the longer one on the top in the photo above, goes to some sort of fitting inside the tank and just doesn't want to come loose. Afraid I would  break something with disastrous results if I pulled any harder, I decided to just leave it as is. But as long as I was there I went ahead and replaced the shorter line even though it was still in good shape, (This rotting of the fuel line issue is not new and I have a stock of new, alcohol resistant, tubing on hand.)

but for some strange and frustrating reason, the particular bit of fuel line that runs from the filter in the tank up to the carburetor is a different size!! And of course I don't have that size. . .

Wrench Three!

So now the whole disassembled mess is cluttering up a corner of my workbench until we make another run into town and I can get the right tubing. . . Which will hopefully be soon since all my nicely cut rounds are still sitting out there on the ground!