Water and wildlife

Some of you might be aware that Memorial day here in Central Texas was a tad wet, to put it mildly.

In fact it was no joking matter when 8 inches of rain fell on Blanco Texas in a few hours and shortly thereafter, at the downriver town of Wimberly, the Blanco River crested at an estimated 43feet. That's estimated because just after the river hit 40' the flood gauge washed away. Flood stage is 13' and a few hours before it crested the river was running somewhere in the 6' range. Uninsured homes in the 500 year flood plain are a total loss. Homes closer to the river just don't exist anymore and as I write this, over two weeks later, several of the missing are still missing despite the efforts of hundreds of volunteers, several search organizations and a few government agencies.

We got 5.65" of rain that day here are our place. But because we are up high the only real flooding we had to contend with was at the several low-water crossings on the roads in and out of here, but we did have plenty of water flowing!

In fact our pond was running over the spillway for the first time since April of 2009 when we got 12" of rain in one day and 16" for the month. (That year also marked the beginning of a drought that had our pond dried completely up for much of 2011 and into 2012.

Here I am, with my knee-high snake boots on, standing in about 12" of water in the spillway. In April 2009 I was able to easily stand here in my hiking boots which only give me about 6" of protection.

This is taken at the head end of the pond looking upstream and is usually a dry ravine. (We're on one of the highest areas in the county so usually don't get a lot of running water here, instead we're where the water starts from.)

Normally we have two ways to get to the other side of the pond, which basically divides the front and rear sections of our acreage. We can cross on the dam or come here to the head end of the pond and walk across, maybe having to step over a little trickle. Right now the water in front of me is about 8' deep.

This May we saw a total of 15.6" of rain (The long term average for the month is 4.82") and year to date we have had 35.49" (Our long-term annual average is 40.31.) As you might imagine, the ground is saturated and now most the rainfall stays up on top as it runs down towards our pond a hundred yards or so off to the right.

This Ozark Trails 10 man tent has been up the entire month and not a drop of that rain or runoff ended up inside where we had rugs on the floor, tables on the rugs and a bunch of stuff stacked everywhere as it was being sorted out for delivery to various places. Much of the rain was accompanied by thunderstorms that were not always docile, in fact Central Texas had more tornadoes this May than the past decade of Mays combined, yet if you're familiar with this tent you might notice that none of the 6 guy lines have been deployed, (The tent was sitting in the driveway so there just wasn't room to put out the guy lines and still drive around the tent.) yet this sub $200 tent we picked up at Walmart came through with zero damage.

So what is the point of this entry??  Well it all started when I was minding my own business and stumbled across this:

Mud daubers, especially these Black and Yellow Daubers (I guess when it came time to name these guys it was late in the day, everyone just wanted to go home, and imagination had run out back there  around lunch-time.) are common around here, but the wet spring has all creatures out in abundance, including the daubers.

This trio hung around under-foot like this for well over an hour. Sometimes a marauding dauber would fly down at full speed and crash into them, knocking the stack over on it's side, but they never let go and always righted themselves. I'm not an entomologist so I can only imagine that these three are up to something I've only ever been able to fantasize about.

Now daubers are persistent little buggers, (Get it? Buggers?!) and when it comes to location for their nests, seem to prefer my stuff over whatever nature has provided. There's usually a drawer here in my lathe cart, but when I went to open it that big nest up in the top left was blocking the way.

Repeated jerking of the drawer eventually knocked the bottom of that nest off and freed the drawer, although it was full of nest bits,

Including the paralyzed spiders the daubers leave behind for the little ones to feed on once they hatch.

For some reason, even though there are gaps when the 10'x12' barn doors are closed, the daubers don't like to use them. When I close the doors in the evening the daubers trapped inside stay inside and when I open them in the morning I'm reminded of that scene in Apocalypse Now where the helicopters are attacking the beach. Swarms of the daubers are hovering just outside and for a moment there is mayhem as the ones inside wanting out collide with the ones outside wanting in, and daubers are not shy creatures so several will bounce right off me in the process.

I leave them plenty of easily accessible spots to build their nests, but do you think that's good enough for them??  No way.

This drawer in my router station fits pretty tightly, but I have to share the holes in my bit organizers with the daubers anyway.

Sometimes their choice of nest location is baffling.

This little tool organizer is for my modeling tools and it sits out in the open on my workbench,

Yet the other day I went to grab one of the tiny files there in the middle of this photo, files I had used just the day before, and found them all bound together at the exposed ends with a dauber nest. (Didn't think to take a picture before I got rid of it.)

So anyway -  while that trio of daubers was cavorting around on the floor, I took my lath cart apart and cleaned the nests out of it. The debris filled about 3" of a five gallon bucket but I threw it out before remembering to take a photo. . . But here is the cart, all cleaned up and ready for the next squadron of daubers. Wait! I think I just saw one fly in there!!!

Anyway, where was I before I was so rudely interrupted??

Oh yeah, building a mobile craft and hobby station. . . More on that in the future.

2015 garden update

It's been a month and a half since the last garden update and what a month and a half!!

It has been grey and cold and rainy nearly every day since. I think we hit our average daily high maybe 3 or 4 times during that period, the rest of the time we were cold! Several days it never got out of the 30's.

When I started the 2015 garden I said I would probably plant another flat or two in a couple weeks to compensate for the probably optimistically early start. Well that didn't happen! I only have just so much heat-mat and grow-light room and the cold weather meant I couldn't free much of it up, not to mention scraping ice off the windshield puts a bit of a dampener on the gardening bug.

One thing I did get on was building a little water tower and installing a drip-irrigation system that uses a zero-pressure timer. As is my nature, I grabbed left overs, treated lumber and some of those old cedar fence boards, to make the tower. The proportions are wrong but it's supposed to remind you of an old railroad water tower. It took a little math and fiddling with tool setups to get the angles right on the 'tank' and building the removable roof was even more interesting.














The tank is sized for a 5 gallon bucket into the bottom of which I installed a bulk-head fitting and a boiler valve. The timer hangs off of this and gravity feeds the tubing.

A future modification will be to install a low-power solar pump to pump water, from the tank that catches rainwater off the greenhouse roof, up into the bucket. The pump will run whenever there is enough sunlight and an overflow installed in the bucket will return excess water right back to the main tank. I can potentially collect about 50 gallons for every inch of rain, so with enough rainfall that will create a perpetual watering system.

Radish, kale and lettuce, in the farthest box. The big leafy thing in the middle box is broccoli. It survived the winter but only produced a few small, but very flavorful florets that I harvested a couple at a time by bending over and biting them directly off the plant. mmmm good! But it was finished so I pulled it just after this photo.

I did move a few things out to the greenhouse the second week of February because they were getting pretty crowded under the grow light. So the radishes, letuce and kale all made it into one of the Grow-Boxes. The only protection they had during the frequent freezes was a layer of floating row cover draped over the PVC frames and held in place with spring clamps.

The average last frost around here is the first week of March and the long-range forecast shows that icy crap from the arctic finally staying up there at the top of the planet where it belongs, so, in another show of optimism I have folded up the row cover and stored it away.

Now that first batch of radishes is about a week past their expected harvest date. They look a little woody and miss-shapen in this photo but the one I sampled (pulled it up, burshed the dirt off, bit off the dangling root, spit it out and ate the radish standing right there) was pretty dang good.

The lettuce, on the right, and kale, on the left, are still 2 and 4 weeks respectively away from expected first harvest but they are going to have to do a lot of growing in a hurry to meet that deadline!!

The beans were also protected by row cover but, though they started off gangbusters, didn't do well at all, so today I planted a couple more right into one of the pots.

I also moved 4 tomato plants and three broccoli from under the grow light in the barn into pots in the greenhouse today,

along with a few sprigs of basil.

 Some additional direct-sowing of some radishes, lettuce and bunch-onion into a couple of the other Grow-boxes finished up the gardening for the day.

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. . .