My Adventures in... Everything

Inside the Belly of the Fire Worm

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:18:51 GMT

Today I gritted my teeth, gathered my courage and did the (for some reason) very intimidating chore of exploring our chimney and investigating what I'd have to buy so that we could clean it ourselves. I had been putting this off all summer.

Because I did find it very scary (heh) I started easy with this little hatch I knew to be for emptying out a large ash bin underneath the living room fireplace. The lady who sold us the house said it only needs to be emptied once every 10 years or so.

Opening it revealed... ashes. Wow! That was unexpected! ;-) I guess if we are not going to be using a chimney sweep anymore I should probably just go ahead and shovel that out one of these days.

To the left of that is this little door which connects to the other flue (the boiler one). I had never actually examined this area really carefully so this was the first time even noticing this door for me. I learn something new every day!

It is made of concrete and is held into its opening by gravity.

The flue is amazingly clean down at the bottom. Since the boiler outlet is about 4 feet higher up and heat rises, I guess that should not be surprising. So the ultimate goal of any cleaning up above would be to make it look just like this! Good luck, heh.

Looking up from that vantage we can see where it's clean for some ways, and then the soot starts a few feet up. The little white square is the sky showing at the top of the chimney since the chimney cap is not currently on. I measured the inner dimension of the chimney as roughly 7" x 11". This is important for determining proper brush size for cleaning.

Looking down, there is a small pile of gack at the bottom of the shaft. This is where everything will have to be vacuumed up from after the chimney is cleaned, because it'll fall down here. The white dot to the left is a light artifact on the camera.

This is an extreme closeup picture of the joint between that little square opening I'm shooting through and the chimney flue proper. Unfortunately only the left-hand side looks this nice. The top, bottom and right are unfinished. I have this noted down as an area of concern. Even though heat clearly doesn't make its way down here much, shouldn't this be finished out?

The spider shown in the bottommost photo left in a hurry when I started taking pictures.

Bye!!! Lucky dog. I still have a ways to go.

My next project was to disconnect the stovepipe coming from the boiler, and inspect the "ground zero" of heat emissions so to speak. It is directly above the aforementioned hatch at about my midriff level.

Looking down from that opening we can see where the nice clean chimney starts down below.

Holy crust buckets Batman! Looking up we can see lots of very loose flaky black crust that has formed. We can also see two more large round openings that used to be inputs from old, no longer existing heating systems. The first time the chimney sweep came he said those should probably be bricked up at some point. From what I can see, the black stuff loves to accumulate around them.

Mmm... ick. The smaller ridges are the divisions between the tiles forming the flue liner. They really have a rough joint that can stick out as much as an inch. The big black hole at middle foreground is one of those round entry points I mentioned above.

I took high resolution pictures that highlighted each of the 4 walls so I could study them later closeup. This one was like travelling deep into a tunnel when I zoomed into it in PhotoShop.

Crust!

For the most part the black stuff is really weak and crumbly, which is what we want to see. Not only is it easier to clean than the glassy baked on stuff, but it justifies the laborious year we spent spraying Anti-Creo-Soot on each log before throwing it in.

Finally I investigated the top opening, which is one of the unused ones from an old heating system. The other of the two is around the corner and a little lower. I didn't figure I'd have to remove them both to see what was going on though.

Ew! Creosote cupcake, anyone???

Clearly a lot of gack was accumulating around this opening, probably because of the rough edges. The side entry, which can be seen bottom center, looked a lot better but this one is directly above the one from the existing boiler. I felt around with my hands and found some evidence of some gaps and such that will need to be investigated further once the chimney is cleaned.

Here's a patch that looks more glazed than flaky, but it is also extremely thin rather than built-up. Still from that last opening, looking up. At this point I have pretty much probed into every orifice available to me down in the basement, and I wasn't about to climb up on the roof with nobody else home, so it was time to buy the stuff.

SHOPPING LIST:

Item Description	Qty	Price	Amount
8" x 12" Wire Chimney Brush 5SB-36533	1	$48.97	$48.97
48" Fiberglass Rod 1/4" NPT 5SB-30624M	9	$6.97	$62.73

After measuring the flue and the chimney height I (gulp) ordered the brushes for releasing all the black flakey crap from the chimney walls. They ought to take a few days to arrive so I am ~~safe~~ stuck waiting until then. Too bad!

Here's the stovepipe that joins the boiler to the chimney. It looks really clean, probably because the air is still blazing hot when it goes through this part.

If we did have to clean it though, we already have the correct brush (the large one at center).

Here's where it attaches to the backside of the boiler. Note to self: damper lever uses "drawbridge" principle rather than "portcullis" principle. I knew always leaving it at 45° was cheating!

There's a little bit of crust on the backside of the fire box. The gap the air comes through is really narrow and around the edges. There are many fancy brushes one can buy to try to get into all these crevices but I decided not to buy any at this time because I want to see what I can do with the brushes I have been using on the front end of the beast. ;-)

ALL DONE! (for now)

(goes off to collapse in a heap)

Garden Update, With Salsa

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:22:22 GMT

After 3 busy weeks at Big Top I was awash in CSA vegetables including many pounds of tomatoes, which makes it Freezer Salsa time! I have enough tomatoes to make 2 enormous batches just to catch up. Each one takes all day (it has to boil until it has halved in volume) so I'll be at it for a while.

I made this first batch using CSA onions and grocery store peppers. The jalapeños from the store are amazingly irritating to my hands and eyes... oddly enough not so hard on the tongue. Hours later and many handwashings later my fingers still burn and my eyes will burn if I accidentally touch them. Eek!

Here are the cute little jalapeños from my container garden. The larger of the two is about 1.5" tall and the smaller more like 1". Perhaps I will include them in the second batch.

I also have several of these 1 to 1.5" diameter yellow onions which grew from sprouted greens from last year's CSA deliveries. I will probably use these first in the 2nd batch, because from reading online I fear these guys' shelf life may not be as good as the large ones that came this year.

Speaking of stuff grown out of the garbage (heh) this celery heart continues to thrive outside. However, it is not getting any larger. I am thinking I will take off a few leaves at a time and use them for bouquet garni and such. It's probably quite flavorful!

The carrots also continue to do quite well, but are coming a long very slowly. The instructions I was following certainly weren't kidding when they stated the radishes I co-planted with them would mature much more quickly! I wonder if I should use an early type next time. This tiny little dude was about 1" long not counting the tail. It tasted just fine but wasn't as flavorful as a mature one would be I think.

I also have small amounts of pod peas. Here they are on the plant. I'll probably just eat them fresh in handfuls because there aren't really enough to be worth preserving this time. It was more of a proof of concept planting I guess!

These taste nothing.... NOTHING... like any frozen or canned or dried green peas I've ever had. I've been missing out! Very complex and tasty.

I also have snow peapods that produced, but something about them is not compatible with my tongue. They sting my mouth like nettle and then I get a dull sore throat the next day. Since I did not use chemicals on the plant I guess it was the plant itself. Different brand of seeds next year, I'm thinking.

The Bush family continues to do well in their new home. Now that I've seen them go through a complete cycle think I have a good idea of which ages of branches no longer bear and should be pruned off early next spring. Pretty much most of them at this point; I wonder how long it had been since they were pruned properly at their old home?

All around the outer edges of the bushes, tender new shoots are coming up. They will produce in some future year!

Flowers!

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:02:09 GMT

Today my dear Spouse surprised me with this amazing bouquet sent from the middle of the Pacific. Wow!!!!

I've never gotten flowers without any special occasion before. I have been walking around with a big stupid grin on my face. :D

Oh, How I A-Door You

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 22:57:02 GMT

Yesterday I made a little progress on the door between the basement stairwell and the server/mud room. For the first time I started scraping paint from the frame, which was really interesting because this stuff had been bought used still covered with paint and it was my big chance to see how nice the wood is. Not bad!

Click to see the image larger. The doorway is really deep because this wall used to be an outer wall of the house, and then someone made a stud wall on the other side to cover the exterior siding when the old garage was made into a room.

Again, click to see it larger. For some reason the vertical pictures are always a little harder to see than the horizontal ones. Weird. The reddish stained wood on the underside of the header is the color the entire doorframe will ultimately be stained. It is basically the color of amber shellac.

I have done a lot of wood-filling since I did my scraping, and had not yet re-sanded when I took these pictures, so I apologize for the shmutz smeared all over everything. In these pictures one can also see that I made an initial attempt at scraping paint off this side of the door itself. Unfortunately it has many, many layers of very pernicious paint. I got about five of them off with still only a hint of wood showing underneath. I definitely have my work cut out for me there!

The other side of the door is now filled and sanded enough to be painted. I put on a first coat of "albino white semi gloss" to match the rest of the trim in the server room. I still need to put on an additional coat of that, and also repaint the surrounding wall "albino white flat" to clean up. The salvage hinges and doorknob plate need to be cleaned up of old paint, probably as a separate operation. And of course the window needs to be scraped clean after it's all done. It's looking really nice though!

Oh, Yuck! Or, I Just Stuck My Finger In A Boat Nostril

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 18:11:14 GMT

Well, my Spouse was asked to stay longer aboard the M/V Manoa so, as I believe we all knew was inevitable, it fell to me to winterize the inboard engine of the Golden Girl. It being my first time I had to be guided through it by telephone. But what doesn't kill me makes me stronger, right.............?

On my way to the Big Top yesterday I took the truck instead of the Prius and threw in the large ladder needed to climb up to Golden Girl where it sits on its cradle. The winterization consisted of running the engine to make it suck antifreeze out of a bucket, pushing out all the water currently in the engine for coolant.

There were a lot of firsts for me here. For example it was my first time to climb into the surprisingly deep crevice inside a boat engine compartment to retrieve a hose way too far away to reach by hand. It was also my first time personally observing the phenomenon of the sun heating up a clear hose and making it suck up fluid without any motor doing the work. Apparently this leads to boats being sunk upon occasion. By far the most memorable part of this process was afterward when I was asked to stick my finger in the boat's... well, I can only describe it as the boat's nostril, to see if the um... discharge... was green. If it hadn't been, I'd have to repeat the exercise adding more anti freeze to push more water out.

I'm here to say it was indeed green. Note to self... bring hanky for wiping finger next time.

Also someone had left a discarded lamp near the dumpster, which I kept ~~in revenge~~ as a present for my Spouse:

It's about a 6" diameter chrome spotlight head with what appears to be a good working lamp inside. The head itself appears to have been dented at one time, and the dent successfully pounded out. There is still a small crack where the dent was pounded out.

The other end resembles a chrome eyestalk with a fitting allowing it to be mounted on a deck or some such. The inside/underside half of the mounting has a handle, presumably for rotating the head, and also a toggle switch for on/off. I would judge this thing needs to be rewired. That will be a good project for someone who missed out on all the fun of the winterizing.

Big tops pushing up at the Big Top

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:54:13 GMT

Only one week left of the Big Top Chautauqua's season. I am hoping to climb the hill and get some photos on my last day (next Saturday) but in the meantime,

On what I think of as the south side of the Spirit Cottage, this field of cup-shaped mushrooms has been sprouting for several weeks. Here's a view from a distance, showing the entire colony on a little triangle of grass by the woods. The path worn at lower right is one of two tracks left by cars being driven around the cottage to drop things off at the door nearest the kitchen.

They're quite large -- maybe 5 or 6 inches across. Inside each one, moss is firmly rooted and growing. When I took this picture it hadn't rained in a while so the moss was suffering. Also kids have been playing with the mushrooms and removing the moss.

There is also one bright yellow mushroom that appeared yesterday, and which inspired me to start taking these pictures. It is quite large, being at least 6" tall and 3" or 4" in diameter. It is a luscious golden yellow in color with cream-colored horizontal bands and small dark speckles.

It seems to exist quite happily amongst the other kind of mushrooms. I wonder if I work here again next year, will another yellow one sprout again in the same spot?

Not far away, along the side of a gravel driveway leading to the staff parking lot, I found this strip of round mushrooms without stems, growing in little clusters.

When I was growing up in inner-city Minneapolis, southside, we had small pure white round mushrooms that would dry into black shriveled "puff balls" that could be squeezed to shoot the spores out. I do not know if these will do that too or not.

They are surprisingly handsome close-up, with regular patterns of dots that remind me a bit of a sea creature.

I also managed to capture this shot of an amazingly large grasshopper... must be 6 feet long!! Holy cow!

Mushroom Update: Day Four!

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:33:18 GMT

Check these out! The instructions say they are good to eat anytime after they start looking like real mushrooms, but I just can't bear to hurt a hair on their little heads.

I stuck my hand in the picture for scale. It is amazing that they grew that much in only 2 days. But I guess if I'd been squished inside a 1 foot high log for 3 months I'd be in a hurry to escape too.

Mushroom Update: Day Two

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:30:17 GMT

The second day after busting out of the holes drilled through the bark, the fruits of the Shiitake Mushroom Log are already looking like real mushrooms with caps and everything!

The lower part of the bark is wet because I was leaving the dish full of water in the desperate hope of not killing off the log again!

Pane in the Neck

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 05:19:07 GMT

I was so thrilled about how nice the windows looked in the downstairs stairwell after I cleaned the paint stripper off them, I decided to do the same in my office today. Imagine my dismay when one particular pane did not clean up, and instead even got worse! I was completely baffled. It was as if the goo smeared all over it had mysteriously become hard as diamond when all the other panes cleaned up just as easy as that other window had. WTF??

Well, I showed this to my Spouse and he took one look at it and said, "it's not glass, it's Lucite". Ehhhhhhh? I tapped my finger on each pane and they sounded exactly the same. They even looked the same, in the middles anyway. I'd been looking at these windows for 2.5 solid years and never saw the one as different than the others. Then, to prove it, he took his keys out and tapped on each pane with the metal keys. The dirty one made a conspicuously dull "thud" compared to the other two. D'OH!!! You can't slip one past an engineer! LOL. It will remain like that for now, but ultimately I will have to replace that piece... preferably with a nice piece of glass.

Speaking of the stairwell I have the new door nearly completely stripped now. It matches the trim woodwork perfectly, as if it was always there! Oddly enough it has a powerful scent of pine unlike any of the other wood I stripped. I don't know if it's just a slightly different species, or if the wood is newer, or was preserved differently, or what. When the doors have all been shut up and you first walk in there, the alcoholy piney scent is about enough to knock ya out. Whew!

Mushroom update, this time with actual MUSHROOMS.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 04:58:45 GMT

As reported in a previous post, I had nearly given up on my Shiitake Mushroom Log I bought on Amazon.com, after 2 months of non performance upon arrival. However after trying the techniques I described in that post, 2 actual mushrooms began to get extruded from a drill hole at the bottom and a break in the bark next to that. Orange arrow indicates the items in question below:

I am beside myself with excitement! Here is a closeup showing them in detail. They are extraordinarily phallic in appearance but I will not hold this against them. Besides I think their little caps will grow in time. I must now go and write of my happy experiences on Amazon.com because I had noticed a dearth of people commenting to say their log actually worked, something which was causing me considerable angst up until today.

Also in gardening news today I cooked a breakfast consisting 100% of locally grown produce: nice brown eggs from the free-range chickens at the farm where we buy our fresh poultry, and spinach, parsley and green onions from my container garden. w00t!

Ceiling Moistened; Panick Ensues

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 04:46:56 GMT

OK so today we had a HUGE EMERGENCY, involving water moistening the ceiling over my Spouse's office and said Spouse running frantically all over the place freaking out, and the attic was briefly investigated (from a safe distance through the hole leading up to it) and the leak was pronounced to be near the chimney where there was no flashing but since the chimney cap had been removed it now leaked more with the wind coming from the Northeast and a heavy rain all morning, and OMG we need to rent a boom lift so off we go, and now we arrive back with a rental Condor in the driveway, and OH Dear it doesn't reach to the chimney and now we have to bring it back, and the hardware store didn't have patching compound and it's still raining cats and dogs and no I am not controlling my emotions I am getting something DONE ABOUT IT BECAUSE IT'S OUR HOUSE.

Uh... (cough) ahem. The above photo was shot at an upward angle inside our roof, with the chimney on left. The dark area in the middle is boards moistened by water coming in the gap between the roof and the chimney. This was the view I found when I realized I was going to have to do something about the above-described emergency myself, and climbed up into the attic to see. Since it's on the other side of the chimney from where the entrance to the attic is, I ended up hugging the chimney and edging around it to the other side. I was quite a sight by the time I crawled outta there let me tell you! Head to toe soot, mud and insulation gack.

Temporary solution in place: A twisted up towel shoved into the leak gap with a rope running down to guide the water away from the house wood.

This photo is pointing down at the "floor" underneath the leak. Basically it's about 6" of cellulose insulation that has gotten soaked. My Spouse was concerned that this stuff would come through the ceiling rather precipitously once it got heavy enough. Because the insulation made it impossible to see where was safe to step, and I didn't want to go through the plaster myself, I am taking this picture perched atop another mid-air beam like the one shown. The wire on the right hand side is part of the still-functional knob and tube wiring for the 2nd floor lights. I was doing my best to not electrocute myself while working next to it.

Here's the second wick in place, since the gap continued to the other side of a beam and the first towel wasn't long enough. My only fear was that these would get too heavy with water and rip themselves away from position. I used a lot of staples to hopefully keep them in place but I'll have to check on them again tomorrow. They only have to last long enough for a roof repair fellow to be hired to put actual flashing in.

The two ropes run down to this pair of buckets which will collect the water. The one beam that is directly under the leak is pretty weak. I suspect it'd been getting wet for years. Luckily it doesn't appear to be particularly load-supporting.

Note to self: get roof repair quotes tomorrow.

Transom Sandwich and a Dorito-Sized Foredeck

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:00:20 GMT

The recent excellent weather has accelerated our desire to go fishing on the new (well, old) rowboat, and hence our work on same. New plywood has now been cut to replace the old rotted out wood transom. Since the boat is old and irregular a lot of the measuring had to be done several times. Here's a photo showing it being temporarily bolted onto the boat to check size/shape:

The transom consists of two pieces of 3/4" plywood sandwiching the boat aluminum. Resting on top (not attached in this picture) is a small wood cap. All of this is sized to allow the small Johnson motor we have to clamp on well. As a short update on that, after being rebuilt its only problem was not enough cooling water flow. After much experimenting the problem seemed to be sand having washed out and widened some of the passages inside, lowering the amount of vaccuum force available. Re-building those passages with epoxy seemed to help in the barrel so we're now ready to test it on the actual lake again. Cross fingers!

Here's a closeup of the transom "sandwich" with the cap removed. Total thickness is 1.5". We also are replacing the triangular piece of wood that was up at the bow. I'm not sure I got any photos of that before removing it but basically the old one was smashed and splintered, perhaps from a bad episode with a chain or some such. The eye for attaching the bow line is right below it, so that area probably gets a lot of friction.

After some discussion we agreed the best word we could think of for this piece of wood is the "foredeck" small though it is. Here it is temporarily test-fitted to the bow. Not sure if you can see them here but there are two small holes for the mounting of a cleat (inherited from the previous owners) and a circle designating where there will be a large round hole for the bow line to come up through.

Here are the new bits removed and being stained. Since this picture was taken 2 coats of varnish have also been put on the insides (that will be towards the aluminum and other pieces of wood). The outsides will be varnished many times once it is actually on the boat. However two more things we, or rather I, have to do before putting these on permanently is to de-gunk the inside of the boat again, and scrub off that old paint that is near where the wood will be mounted so it can be repainted in those areas. Don't want to have to remove the wood again any time soon!

More updates as work progresses. I may go and fish off the shore tonight. I'll let y'all know how that goes too, if I do.

Flowerings!

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 04:07:02 GMT

I did a bunch of gardening stuff today, moving everything out that had been brought into the garage for several days frost. I also planted a bunch of stuff that was either newly bought, or home-sprouted and ready to be transplanted. Click on the image below to see a nice big, crisp closeup of my container garden project diagram as it currently stands.

I am really enjoying PlanGarden.com and I think I will stick with it through next year again to see how it develops. It has a bug or two but overall it's made my job much easier and definitely saved my sanity. I had heard of people doing this kind of garden planning with magnets and whiteboards but this was a much cheaper investment as I did not already have those things lying around. If you want to see my project "live" as it were, and play with the tools (don't worry, it won't let you save any changes to my garden!) follow this link.

It's now necessary to use 3 photos to contain all the um... containers. Here's part 1 of 3 (Left).

Part 2 of 3 (Center). Those are the blueberries in the background, down on the ground.

Part 3 of 3 (Right). Newly planted today and visible throughout the above pictures: Purchased 2" pots of Thyme, Jalapeño, Rosemary and Sage; and purchased 5" pots of oregano and spearmint.

I also transplanted some Spacemaster Cucumbers that I had sprouted indoors. They are to be companion plants to Space Hybrid Spinach that was started outdoors. The photo above shows one of the mixed pots with the baby cucumber newly planted in the space left for it. I had mentioned in a previous post that these cucumber sprouts had not transplanted well when I moved them from their tiny starter pots to 4" ones back on May 20th, swooning dramatically within moments of being transplanted. Amazingly though, all five survived. Now we'll see if they survive the transition to outdoors... and if they get along with the spinach.

Here's an odd thing. I have 4 containers of Space Hybrid Spinach. Three of them are like the one on the right in the picture above. Then there is only one like the one on the left. All three of the reddish-brown plastic pots have huge robust spinach as shown on the right. The black pot has tiny spinach and one of the three planted even died. That was convenient in a way because it gave me someplace to plant the extra cucumber, but it does make me wonder what the heck is wrong with that pot that made the spinach grow so badly. It will be interesting to see if the cucumbers are badly affected also, compared to their brothers in the other pots.

The blueberry Bushes seem to be doing well enough in their new home... at least nobody has gotten killed yet. "Jenna" and "Dubya" both have flowers now. Check this out (click to see it bigger):

I guess this means I'd better get that bird netting ordered! So far they are the only 2 that have flowers, but "Dubya" started flowering a day after "Jenna" so there's still hope the others will come in the next several days. There's the possibility that we were sold very old bushes that are beyond their fruiting years. However it's also possible is some of them need to be pruned better, or decided not to flower because of the shock of being transplanted. Only time will tell! Assuming the guys who sold them to us were truthful though, they should have a good 5-7 years of fruit left in them once they start flowering in their new spot.

My Bok Choi is also flowering. What a lovely color of yellow! It suddenly popped when I moved it indoors for a hard freeze the other night. Guess that answered the question of whether I was going to eat it or let it open ;-) Now to see what kind of oddball seeds are produced. I have a feeling they won't necessarily be 100% bok choi offspring, since there is no other flowering bok choi nearby. I'm sure there are cabbagelike weeds though.

In other flower news, I planted these Coral Bells and Meadow Sage in a small pre-existing flower plot I had weeded the other day. They were cheap at Wal Mart. I wanted something labeled "partial shade" because as can be seen in this picture there actually is a lot of shade there. but the lilac above them does bloom so it seems there's enough sun for flowers, more or less.

Here's a slightly wider view showing the lilac, and beyond that (center of backyard) the baby Liberty Elm with its labeled rock at its feet. Note to self: need 1 more Coral Bells.

While trimming near the deck today I discovered something that is apparently mint, at the feet of what apparently isn't alfalfa. If you click on the picture above, the "mint" I'm referring to is the short stuff that has red stems. When I started cutting it away with shears it really minted up the place! I decided to leave the rest until I found out if it is edible. Drool. Anybody recognize this mint? For that matter, anybody recognize the taller not-alfalfa behind it?

Progress in Upstairs Stairwell

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:56:22 GMT

Got some more paint scraping done in the upper stairwell. I did the top half of the door -- it looks like it was made to go there hehe. The blue line to the right is to protect the previously-bared wood when the second coat of yellow paint is put on the walls.

Once it is completely scraped, I can pull it out of the doorway and scrape the right-hand edge, then laminate more wood onto that so that the door can be made to exactly fit this doorway. That will make it possible to mount it on its hinges instead of having it held in with wedges. One time there was a terrific gust of wind and it popped the door off the wedges so it came crashing down. Boy did that make us all jump :D

The window that had been partially scraped before is now completely scraped. It looks great! The following day, I also washed all the Zip Strip gack off the glass and for the first time in weeks you could see through the window really well. Progress has been made! w00T!

Bonus! Tulip photos

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:39:08 GMT

The tulips on our back lotline finally gave out yesterday, but I managed to get a few photos when they were at the height of their final glory....

I Didn't Inhale... Much (My Paint Scraping Progress Report)

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:31:58 GMT

Now for an update on my efforts in paint removal....

I scraped a bunch more paint off the window sills in my office the other day. I'd say the process there is about 2/3 done now. One or two more days labor left at most -- call it one full day, and then a day of mostly nitpicky stuff like the pesky wooden ridges between glass panes. The most interesting thing about this paint scraping report was that in the course of attempting to take an evidenciary photograph of my work, I kept getting these amazing unintentional atmospheric shots. Here's just a sampling:

You can click on these to see closer up. The upper half of the right hand window still has the old Pepto-Bismol colored paint... yuck!

This window is completely done except for some finishing touchups on the upper half's between-panes wood. I sort of had to do one window first so that I could always have one open when using the chemicals.

Wow! I could sit and look at this one for hours. I can also look at this for hours when it's in person rather than in a photograph. Maybe this is why I get so little done while in my office. Notice the difference in the wood of the inner piece of molding. I think that may have been subbed in at a later date than the original windows were built.

Smoooth. Niiiice. Don't forget to click on the closeups.

When I finally did manage to get a properly lit photo, it was pretty much an anti climax. LOL. Anyway, since I took these photos I have sanded, filled and repainted the walls around the window so it will look civilized while the project is still in progress. That seems to help in keeping my Spouse from becoming agitated. It's always good when one's hobbies don't agitate one's spouse.

Another paint scraping project I've been working on recently is this piano bench. My piano, a 1914-ish Edmund Gram upright grand, did not have a bench so I bought this one on eBay. It's the closest I've been able to find that was close enough in style and was somewhat oak-ish (no clue what the actual wood type is) that didn't also cost a fortune. Some time when you are bored try to buy a 1915 era tiger-oak piano bench. It is kind of scary!

The downside was it had this fake red cherry finish. This stuff turns out to be incredibly pernicious. Zip Strip, my preferred paint remover, doesn't put a dent in it at all. The reason the top looks so scraped up in the top picture is because I ended up using the "brute force" technique (scraping with the actual paint scraper, go figure) while using the Zip Strip as a sort of lube. The good news is, the project is nearly finished. And the marks are nothing a good round of sanding won't get rid of.

This chair is getting a stripping at the same time. It is not a priority, but it was in the room I was doing the bench stripping in (our guest room) and I needed something else to work on so that I could alternate waiting for the Zip Strip to (not) work and then scraping. This chair was inherited from the owners of our previous house. It looks kind of OK with a small bedroom desk we own so I have kept it around. I think it is solid clear maple now that I've seen a little of the wood. It has like 15 coats of paint on it (you can tell by the colors that came off) so it's going to be one of those loooooooooooong projects....

Gardening Update, Including Mushroom Breakthrough!

Sun, 31 May 2009 20:54:40 GMT

Hello, this entry is a huge yard and garden update!

First a blueberry update. The Bushes, which were just starting to bud when we bought and planted them, are now starting to leaf out. I did a bunch of research on blueberry pruning which is very important to their health and especially their productivity. Unfortunately you're really supposed to prune them each year during their dormant (winter, pre buds) stage. Needless to say we missed that this year. I found a small number of references to pruning during the year also though, and it sounds like if I really wanna prune this year I need to wait until after they flower in any case. So for now I will stick with water and sulfur. My aluminum sulfate arrived so I should be able to add some of that on top of the soil, then check pH every 40-60 days after that.

I forgot to mention it before, but we accidentally received 2 rosebushes along with our blueberries. This was because three of the blueberry bushes came from a small ornamental garden behind the sellers' house, and some of the roses had roots pretty much inseperably entwined with the blueberries. Since I planted the blueberries, one of the roses has since died. However, the other one is doing great and has even sent up a new cane from the ground nearby. I wish I had noted down more carefully what type of rose it was, since it appears it's going to live. All I remember is that the fellow said it was a very fancy type. Maybe I will see if I can contact him again and write down the exact breed name this time.

The earliest-planted potatoes are tall enough to pack in more "ground" underneath them now. I have actual straw now but I haven't yet decided if I should switch over to straw or stick with the shredded paper since I started with that. Maybe some potatoes with each, to see which works best? I still think this box might be too crowded, but what can ya do. Next year when the potatoes are planted in ground instead of containers, there'll be more room all around.

I have now had my first non-green-onion harvest from the container garden! It is this fistful of Cherry Belle radishes. It's very odd that I am harvesting spring vegetables the same day I get a frost warning and have to bring a lot of stuff inside. Gotta love gardening in Northern Wisconsin. I'd say the method I found of growing the radishes in containers with Danvers Half-Long carrots is an unqualified success. It remains to be seen if the slower-growing carrots turn out as well as these did, but in the meantime I'm planting two additional containers of this combination each 2 weeks.

Here's the latest planting (foreground), with just the radish sprouts yet showing. Behind it is the pots I just harvested, no longer with radishes but with the carrots just starting to shoot upward more quickly. After taking this photo I thinned the carrots to a 1/2" spacing. Both the carrot and radish thinnings are yummy to eat while picking them!

Click on this picture to see the amazing bok choi flower closeup. I have been doing some research and apparently collecting seed from brassica (cabbage like plants) in the garden can be problematic because they will crossbreed with nearly any kind of brassica nearby, domestic or wild, bok choi or otherwise. So any seeds from this might be crossbred with mustard, canola, brussel sprouts or God knows what. Actually come to think of it, it might be fun to try whatever grows from them. They might taste interesting. In any case there is still a strong argument for harvesting the flower itself and eating it for dinner. They are supposed to be really good! If I was going to do that I'd have to nab it just as it was about to open.

I have now managed to get all the flower bulbs transplanted from the old, too-shaded location near the shed. Here's the new area fully populated. The ones at center, which were transplanted first, now strongly resemble the iris at right so I suspect they may all be the same ones. We'll find out later this summer when they (hopefully) flower though! I would like to lay down a single landscaping timber line as a divider between these bulbs and the lawn at some point.

Once they were all out of the old location, which I refer to in my notes and plans as the "shed area" garden, I started clearing the way for planting something that will actually like that spot. This picture shows the area being weeded, landscaping rocks being arranged more gracefully, and then in the foreground is a large number of broken sidewalk pieces and paving rocks that were buried just under the dirt making it a bit difficult to turn over the soil. I have since taken those over to the back of the lot, where I hope to install pieces of them as a walkway in front of the compost bins.

Here's how it looked upon my getting tired of weeding and hoeing. The "tail" of the garden continues for a good 15 feet farther leftward along the fence. That part is made up of perennial flowering groundcover, commercial strawberries (not like the wild ones that are all over the lawn) and of course lots more weeds. In cleaning up this right-hand end of the garden I found 2 hostas and decided to incorporate them into my plans.

This longer view shows about what people would be looking at while waking past in the backyard. I figured something tall like astilbe would be good in back, and then more of the light-colored hostas would be good in front. I am trying to do perennials as much as possible for the first round in all these gardens, so that there is some hope of "getting ahead" on landscaping. Time enough to play with annuals in the food garden!

Here's the scene as I left it: the dark areas are where I planted ten astilbe roots. The back four are "amethyst" and the front 6 are "taquettii superba". I hope they grow as I got them in the closeout sale where Walmart was getting rid of their roots stuff but at least one of them is already sending up a fuzzy reddish tendril so that's good.

Then in front are 6 tiny hostas, of a white-edged variety though I have no clue whether they are actually the same breed as the ones that were already there. They should look OK alongside them in any case. I could have gotten much larger ones but these were only $2.99 so I figured, once they are planted that is crossed off my list for several years regardless of the size. LOL.

Last but not least, there is promising news in the area of Mushroom Farming. I had been at my wits and and was about to send the shiitake mushroom log back for a refund. But in the course of poring over the Lost Creek Mushroom Farm's home page I found some advice about rhythmically soaking (not shocking, but soaking in room temperature water) the log weekly for a while working for some logs. I commenced doing so, and lo and behold in about 3 cycles of this I got these white bulges coming out of 2 of the drilled holds, breaking through the brown covering. I think these are mushroom pins at last!

I did write to the farm to verify this is the case but if true, then my first crop of shrooms is apparently on its way. My Spouse thinks that maybe both our climate and our humidity in Northern Wisconsin is way outside the parameters people have in mind when writing directions for stuff where ambient conditions are important. In other words, the log may have been frozen way beyond the level of "it is OK if the log freezes" when it was shipped here in mid-January in 20-below weather. Or it's drier here than it would be in nearly any coastal location in the south. I know dryness has definitely been a problem in any case or additional soakings wouldn't have mattered!

More to come on the mushrooms, assuming more are indeed coming ;-)

Mounting the Liberty Elm Plaque on a Rock

Tue, 26 May 2009 21:55:29 GMT

The baby American Liberty Elm is still doing great! It's covered with small, less than 1" long leaves that make me very nostalgic since I grew up surrounded by huge elms in southside inner-city Minneapolis. I hadn't realized I missed elms.

When we got the tree we also received a nice brass plaque with the tree's breed and its propagation year, so I installed this rock to mount the plaque on. Basically I just dug a large hole and buried all but the top 1/3 of the rock. I wanted it to be stable and permanent, but also easily moved in later years if the tree starts to crowd it.

To drill holes for mounting the plaque we used a Hilti TE 16 rotary hammer drill I got at the Goodwill in Woodland Park, Colorado for $20. A lot of Goodwills are overly anal about what they'll accept and you'd never find anything that cool there, but this particular store was really great! I got a ton of good stuff there. Lead anchors were inserted after a pair of holes large enough to accept them had been drilled. Then the plaque was attached with #10 brass screws. Brass so it wouldn't rust, and lead because, according to my Spouse, that is the type to use with brass screws.

Tada! Makes me feel like I live in a fancy conservatory or something. No, really! (hehe)

Getting the Bushes Settled

Mon, 25 May 2009 00:45:45 GMT

Today we worked hard and managed to get the blueberry bushes planted in their new home! Mostly it involved a good deal of shoveling. First we had to shovel out the red clay dirt we'd cleared, hacked into chunks, turned over and weeded a few days ago.

Hmm, take away the green lawn surrounding it and this part would look remarkably like where we lived in Colorado! All told about 10" of dirt was removed from the bottom of the bed, leaving a pit with a wall surrounding it. (We had built the wall the previous day.)

Also we harvested the first ever batch of leaf compost from our big compost operation in the back of the yard. It has been going for a couple years now and finally starting to produce.

This operation basically consisted of pitchforking and shoveling off the top of the compost until we reached the nice black stuff with no recogniseable leaf or grass texture left, which was down at the bottom.

Although we didn't get a huge amount, it is a start and we should have continuous harvests from now on! Here's what the heap looked like after it was entirely turned over and the good bits removed.

This distance shot shows the piles of dirt (left) and compost (right) on the tarp next to the wheelbarrow. The compost is nice and black by comparison to the clay soil! If you click on that photo to see a bigger version you should be able to see the Bushes waiting between the wheelbarrow and the peat moss.

The next step was to mix a dirt recipe, doing it in batches in the wheelbarrow and stirring with a shovel. Our recipe ended up being:

5 shovels of original clay dirt
2 1/2 shovels of compost *
1/2 bag peat moss**
1/2 bag sand
1 small handful elemental sulfur
1 large handful cottonseed meal.

* Because that is all the compost we had ready! Wish there had been more.
** Wish we could have afforded to use twice as much peat moss, but that stuff is expensive!

We spread an initial layer about 10" thick that filled in the bowl we'd shoveled out at the bottom of the bed. This was to give good drainage underneath the roots. This used about half of our supplies.

We then placed the 2 largest bushes (Barbara and George, hehe) before we went any further. This was because they had the deepest root balls. We also watered at this point, to make sure the bottom layer got moist. Then we started adding another layer half as thick as the first one. The other, smaller bushes went in on top of that, and then a final layer of the rest of the dirt. Some of the smaller bushes were interesting to put in because they'd been growing on a steep hill at the farm we bought them from, so their roots were on a diagonal. We got around this by digging a diagonal hole for them with our hands, and adjusting them until the plants looked straight.

Here's the finished bed, with leaf mulch on top. I'll add aluminum sulfate when it arrives in the mail, as well as wood chips. Then I'll check the pH every 40-60 days thereafter, adding more aluminum sulfate until the correct acidity is obtained. It might take quite a while! Fortunately from the yellow color of the leaves I gather the Bushes were not in very acid soil before, so hopefully everything they see here will be an improvement.

These pictures don't do justice to how heavy this work was. Whew! Need I say dirty too? (Goes off to collapse in exhaustion.)

Bush Family's Condo Development Finally Moves Ahead

Sat, 23 May 2009 18:56:31 GMT

The outdoor container garden is doing great! It is now so populated I cannot fit it all in one shot in my camera.

Since the radishes are coming along nicely in the radish-and-carrot containers, I went ahead and planted 2 more of the same. According to the pkgs I should start more every few weeks in order to have harvest all summer. Also new in this picture are the basil, thyme, and chocolate mint (!!!) plants from the plant sale, celery and sage from counter rootings, and a last straggling bucket of sprouted red CSA potatoes.

More stuff. The last of the sprouted green onions (from CSA yellow onions) are planted as well and we've eaten the last of the frozen CSA veggies from last year, so we are all ready for this year's shipments to start arriving! Alas, they won't for a few weeks yet. A couple of the more thick and robust green (yellow) onions have started to flower. I don't know if they'll all do this or just some. I need to look up more about propagating onions :) I am not sure if this means I get to eat them next year, or 2 years from now. We'll see!

As previously reported, the retaining wall for the raised bed for our new blueberry bushes was delayed by several days. What happened was, back on Monday I phoned up Carlson Building Materials and asked if they had 10' landscaping timbers. "Oh," they replied, "those are 8 footers". OK! So my Spouse and I hopped in the big truck and drove down there, paid for 16 of the 8' timbers plus 2 pieces of 1/2" rebar and a cutoff wheel, and they took our money. It was only after we drove the truck around into the treated lumber gate of the yard that it was discovered they had no landscaping timbers in stock.

Back at the main desk up front, they were wringing their hands as I walked in to get my money back. "The computer says there are 240 in stock!" they explained. As it happens, the guy in line ahead of me was also doing something to do with out of stock items, for which he was receiving substitutes. They really wanted me to wait for the timbers to come in, instead of getting a refund, so I told them I'd leave my order intact if they'd deliver them for free on Wednesday when they promised their back order of 240 timbers would arrive. "Thursday at the latest," was their story. The days passed... apparently the timbers were being trucked in from Duluth but kept not being on the truck. Meanwhile the Bushes sit all forlorn with dead leaves packed around their bare roots, being watered twice a day.

But on Friday they arrived and we got to work. Here's a picture of the timbers, cut to size, all laid out in readiness to be put on in tiers. They are surrounding the 6" deep bed we cleared and dug several days ago. They're 3"x4" timbers so at four layers tall this wall will raise the bed up 12" up off the surrounding ground.

All I knew going into this project was that the landscaping timbers were are cheapest available bet for building retaining walls, at least at this time and on a strictly temporary basis. Oh yes, based on the experiences and advice of my friend Debbie Bibb of Running D Ranch, I knew that using rebar to tie the pieces together was important for strength and stability even on a much lower wall than this. I did some research and found a pretty good set of general instructions on the web titled "How to Build a Cheap Decorative Retaining Wall Out Of Landscaping Timber", by Agnes Farside. After a lot of head scratching I created the above drawing, which allowed me to calculate how much landscaping timber and rebar to buy.

One thing we did do differently was that my Spouse felt (again, from personal experience) it'd be easier to stack all four tiers at once, then drill through with a very long drill bit than to put the layers on one at a time as Ms. Farside suggested. Also since we had a four-corner bin rather than a wall on a hillside as they did, we decided not to put on the corner brackets. The thing was incredibly tight and sturdy when it was finished as-was.

The holes are 1/2" in size which is the size of the rebar minus its protruding ribs. This made the holes tight enough that the rebar had to be pounded in with a sledge hammer. For most of the beginning I was employed to sit on the frame to keep the timbers still during the drilling and hammering. Ladies, I highly recommend this enjoyable experience and would definitely do it again.

One end result of this was that we ran all the rods all the way through, instead of having them staggered as shown in the drawing. This meant that there were far more rebar ends showing on top than I'd planned on. I was a little concerned that the rebar would poke out and scratch people -- this being mainly due to recollections of my childhood days playing on city playgrounds in Minneapolis. However, it turns out that the wood is much more springy than the metal of the bar, so the bars could magically be recessed simply by pounding with a big sledge a few extra times. I learn something new every day!

Here's what it looked like more-or-less completed. The next step (it will have to be a project for another day though) is to remove the loose 8-10" of dirt from inside, and mix that with peat moss, sand, dry leaves, and sulfur and install the Bushes in their new home! As a note, that's the new Liberty Elm tree lit up in the background. On the right is what I call the "south garden" of the house.

Here's another shot of the completed wall. It sure looks nice -- it is too bad walls like this don't last long. Well, hopefully it will last long enough for me to save up for a real wall :)

That south garden is finally coming into its own. I think I mentioned before that the majority of the veronicas and purple coneflowers I planted last year have survived the winter and are coming in nice and healthy. I did have to replace a few coneflowers (not shown, but they look like bare spots that break the alternating pattern) and have not quite had luck with that yet. First I planted some storebought purple coneflower seeds indoors but they did not germinate. Now I have planted the remaining storebought seeds directly in the ground where the missing plants were. If that does not work, I have one more thing I can try: planting seeds harvested from last year's coneflowers blossoms. If those don't grow either, hopefully by then Walmart will have coneflowers plants in stock again. I have been checking but they don't have any yet.

I left a 24" lane between the retaining wall and the place where the south garden wraps around the corner of the house. This was partly to set a precedent because I want to have lanes like this between all my raised beds in the future; partly to give better access to the blueberries on all sides for picking; partly to preserve that south bed instead of overshadowing it too badly; and partly to make it easier to maintain. 24" was calculated to allow the lawnmower to get in there fully.

Once the new wall was done my Spouse cut off the pointy end of the old previously existing 4" x 5" landscaping timber that had been lying alongside the deck, so that I could replace it in the corner to finish off that space. Of course, now that we have this new wall the decrepitude of our existing landscaping becomes painfully apparent. I foresee a re-do of that south garden timber border in my rather near future!

Golden Girl!

Wed, 20 May 2009 21:04:01 GMT

We are now the proud almost-owners of an Chance 30-30 sailing yacht by Allied. It once wowed boat racers in Lake Superior years ago. I mean this individual boat did: big and yellow and named Golden Girl, apparently it won a lot of stuff for a long time. The owners moved on to another boat and this one has been unused, though not for long enough to be neglected. It just needs to be scrubbed up and it is ready to go!

It's Federally rather than locally registered and the current owner is waiting for some papers from the Coast Guard so it can change hands. But other than that the deal is done!

Yellow is my favorite color so I am jazzed. Coincidentally my Spouse's previous boat, Caution, was also yellow. We have a history of odd coincidences like that. For instance our first two houses were green, despite green being an uncommon house color in both locations where we lived.

We are told this boat was insanely fast for its day. Although we weren't buying this for racing, the speed is a very happy bonus!

Here is a general website about Allied, and the Chance 30-30 model.

Bush Family Out on Street, Cuke Quints Narrowly Escape Death

Wed, 20 May 2009 20:42:04 GMT

An update on the blueberry bushes, George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna*: I went to the lumber yard to buy landscaping timbers and they first sold them to me, then admitted they didn't have any. So I am waiting on them to deliver... supposedly today or tomorrow. In the meantime, Peat Moss turns out to be insanely expensive, and sand only comes in small containers around here. Woe is me! The Bushes are huddling under plastic bags for now, getting water once or twice a day. I hope they make it!

Yesterday I did a pile of transplanting and stuff indoors. The winner of the Best Sprout Award was definitely the zucchini which was already about 8" tall! I also found three butternut squashes, each about 4" tall and quite robust, as well as Spacemaster Cucumbers. The cucumbers sprouted really well, but they turn out to be problematic to transplant. Out of 6 pots, 7 sprouted (heh) but I snapped 2 in half transplanting them. Oops! The five survivors immediately drooped within 5 minutes of transplanting. Luckily they lasted the night so I think they've made it, but I dread transplanting them to their final location in a week or two. I am going to make a note to wait until after frost and plant Spacemaster directly next year.

Here's the five after they started to droop... OK today though.

I found 1-2 each of tiny basil, oregano, thyme and sage sprouts from my most recent attempts. Let's hope I keep them alive this time! A couple of them are shown above, along with some very robust Pepper sprouts. The little pepper plants are mostly from seeds from grocery store peppers, including small Mexican sweet peppers, and a red bell pepper. Also I have some Hungarian Yellow Wax peppers that did grow from seed, but I'm having a heck of a time getting Jalapeño to sprout. Maybe I will just buy one of those as a plant, lol.

Here are some grape tomatoes I grew from seeds from grocery store grape tomatoes too. I don't personally like this kind of tomato but they are my Spouse's favorite so I figured I'd put in the effort. There sure are a lot of them... in addition to the six I transplanted last night there are 4 more little pots with several underdeveloped sprouts apiece.

Here are some "heirloom" Brandywine Red tomatoes from seed. I wonder at what point they stop being "Heirloom". These came from the regular old seed rack at the grocery store. Sounds pretty mass production to me!

Here are morning glories. I was supposed to plant them 4 weeks before last frost but they are already huge and there are still a week or two left to go. I am thinking that I might move these outdoors now and just replace them if they die, because they aren't going to be very happy growing this fast indoors.

Braeburn apple sprout! This was just sort of a "for fun" sprout.

The avocados need to be moved outdoors soon too. They also need to be transplanted into larger containers. We had a very warm day (80 degrees!) the other day and two seeds that had been sitting on the counter in water for months suddenly split and started growing. Woo!

Today I found a plant sale put on by volunteers who work on gardens in a local city park. Everything was make-a-donation with proceeds going to keep the park beautified. I got 2 basils, 2 thymes, and a chocolate mint (!) plant, as well as a horse chestnut tree I didn't really want but she insisted nobody else would comprehend what it was or take it. I also got a large number of small plastic planting pots, and a fair collection of large pots suitable for planting stuff outside too. All in all a good haul for the donation.

* It has come to my attention that some people are afraid I might be seen as making a tribute to the Bush family by naming my bushes after the Bushes. Never fear! It's not a tribute, they just had to be ID'd somehow and it was more fun than A through F or 1 through 6.

Preparing the Bush Family's New Home

Mon, 18 May 2009 04:15:43 GMT

My Spouse and I both have the habit of perusing the local Craigslist listings for good deals. The other day my Spouse spotted a small farm selling off 200 mature blueberry bushes at $5-10 apiece, all cold hardy low bush cultivars. By the time we managed to get there a day later, we were the very last stragglers, picking off the final 6 bushes available. We got two Northlands and four North Blues, each about 10 years old. The farm was an interesting place, where the 2 guys were a sheep herder and an artist respectively. They had a number of sheep type dogs about the place. The ex-blueberry field was going to become a formal garden.

Here are the blueberry bushes -- George, Barbara, Jeb, Dubya, Laura, and Jenna -- resting in our back yard after a journey in our pickup truck. The first two, the Northland cultivars are much larger than the others and take two people to lift. The others are only 2-3 feet tall.

We spent a bunch of time today preparing the base of a new garden bed for the Bushes. This is the 6' x 9' area we selected. After marking it off with string we used a mattock to chop away the sod, then again to break up the clay soil. A hoe to break up the clods the mattock left, and then a spade to turn it all over once. I did a pH test and it came out between 6.5 and 7 -- way too high for blueberries which prefer 4.8 to 5.2. We're going to build up a 16" high retaining wall of landscaping timbers, then mix the old dirt with peat moss and aluminum sulfate to lower the pH. It'll need elemental sulphur added each year thereafter to keep it down. Ideally you're supposed to start preparing a bed for blueberries a year in advance, but this was all so sudden we didn't get that option. The Bushes do have some of their original dirt with them though which should help a little. Cross fingers!

The deck container plants are doing nicely. Everything that was sown outdoors so far has sprouted. I am having to water these once a day and I am thinking that maybe twice a day will be necessary for the potatoes in the wood crate. I've already eaten several thinned-out sprouts from spinach and radishes... yum! I also stole some of the more spindlier yellow onions for Chinese Foo tonight. There are still a ton of small sprouts and things in the house that cannot be placed outside yet. Tomatoes, peppers etc. We had a 20 degree night last night!

I fooled around with my PlanGarden plot tonight and added the Bushes (each one labeled with his or her name) where their new plot will be. I also changed my overall plot to show our entire yard, and segregated the container plants in a to-scale outline of the deck. I then altered the containers and their plants to match what is actually out there, so this should match the photo now. I still have a whole lot of "to be planted" stuff that was shown on the original PlanGarden plot so I could figure out which size containers to use for what. Those are kind of stashed off to the side of the picture out of sight for now, but ultimately I'll be placing outlines of the house, garage, shed etc. where they can be shown wherever they are throughout the year.

Be sure to click on that to see it close up, it's much better ;-)

Mushrooms, Tulips, Onions, Tomatoes

Mon, 11 May 2009 21:36:59 GMT

The container garden is coming along nicely. The number of containers planted as-planned is getting closer to what is shown on my PlanGarden plot, though there are a bunch yet to go. It is still officially 3 weeks before last frost here! I had to bring in a couple things overnight the last two nights.

I still have a lot of sprouts in the basement, mostly peppers and tomatoes that are sprouted but can't be brought out yet, and melon and squash type things that are too recently planted to have sprouted yet:

A lot of these are in this new potting soil my Spouse got me from Wal Mart, that is supposed to be 100% organic. I'll say! The other day I found these little volunteers in my lettuce sprouts (see inside the orange circles):

They looked like small round seeds growing up on long stalks. Trouble is I hadn't planted anything with seeds like that. Here's a closeup:

Pretty soon there were one or two in every pot! Well, a few days later, boom:

They are tiny mushrooms! LOL. Guess I'll try not to eat those, no idea what they are except they apparently like organic matter. Alas, the Shiitake mushroom log I bought on Amazon did not work out and I have to send it back. Hopefully they will send me a new one that sprouts actual mushrooms! I'll let you all know what ends up happening there.

So here's a little tour of what's outside on the deck right now. First here's the bok choi heart I rooted, looking insanely happy. There's almost enough leaf there to make chinese foo for two again! The center now has a tiny cluster of buds. I think that means it is going to bolt right away. I'm not really surprised since it was basically a mature plant (sans leaves) to begin with. I read that the stalks and buds are edible (inf fact the best part of the bok choi) but I might also like to keep the seeds to plant next year. The alternative would be to harvest these leaves now immediately before it bolts any further. Decisions, decisions!

The red potatoes are starting to sprout and leaf up. These are from CSA potatoes from last fall, that started to sprout over the winter and I kept them sitting on the light table until now. They are planted in layers of shredded paper to give lots of space for potatoes to grow. When the greens get taller I am suppose to keep backfilling the buckets until the dirt and paper reaches the top, for max amount of potato harvest. Cross fingers! Also note to self, find better way to store potatoes next winter.

These green onions are probably the next most ready to go crop after the Bok Choi. They're from white storebought sets. I foresee a harvest of at least a handful of them soon!

These leaning onions are transplanted from large yellow CSA onions that sprouted over winter too. They lean over because I let them grow bigger and bigger in the sheath of their old mother onion, and they leaned way over so they could get more light on the light table. I have since figured out that they can be removed from the original onion as soon as they're clearly seperate entities, and well before they get that big. So in the future I won't have any more leaning ones like this, but hehe this first batch is oddballs. They seem to be getting bigger anyway despite their odd shape.

I hope these will be large round onions also... they are red and white ones from grocery store sets. Just starting to sprout now! They are planted 3" apart from one another in the pots.

Here's the first round of radishes and carrots. I read that I should keep planting new rounds every X number of weeks in order to have continuous harvests. These containers have radishes (showing) and the little guys between them are carrots. The carrots will be big enough to want the extra space by the time the radishes are ready to pull. I hope. The carrots are half-longs so the pots should be plenty deep enough for their growth.

Spinach sprouts. These were the first things I sowed outdoors. The ones in back are co planted with peas. The ones in front don't have their buddies yet.

I really have no idea what to expect from this tiny rosemary sprig. I had no luck growing rosemary from seed but this leftover storebought piece unexpectedly rooted in water. I think it succeeded because it was in the same water with other herbs, one of which must have convinced it to go. I don't hold out a lot of hope that I'll be able to keep it alive, but heck... it's worth a try!!

These two sage plants also rooted in the same container of water. Since I've never had luck with rooting sage before either, I'm convinced there must have been some plant in there that was greatly benefitting these guys. Either that or the rosemary and sage were benefitting each other. Hope they live! That round green guy in the back on the right is a boston red lettuce heart. No roots on that yet... but it hasn't shriveled either.

While at WalMart we splurged and got some potted stuff too. Cilantro (I still haven't managed to sprout any from seed), strawberry (which I had planned to get storebought all along there) and the middle one is a wacky tomato my Spouse took a yen to. It's called Mr. Stripey and the fruit apparently looks like this:

It appears though that the fruit can have any of a huge variety of different kinds of stripes. It'll be interesting to see what we get, assuming I don't kill it first. Since we now have Brandywine Red, grape tomatoes and berry tomatoes in cultivation as well I predict a very tomato-ey summer :) Homemade salsa, here we come!

In other outdoor yard and garden news, I have been transplanting a few of these bulbs each day (see orange arrow in picture). They had been growing over in a very dark corner of the yard that is OK in spring but totally shaded in summer. As a result I have no idea what kind of flowers they are -- they never get a chance to bloom.

Here's the old location with the other half of the bulbs still there. It's a surprising amount of work to move them and keep them safe but the already-transplanted ones are doing great! Maybe 2 more days to get the rest, and then I was thinking maybe plant something else that is more shade-loving in this dark corner.

The newly planted American Liberty Elm is starting to show leaves! Yay!

On the back lotline the Toronto Tulips are now in full bloom, with the pastel regular tulips coming up nearby (not budded yet).

This picture doesn't do them justice but there are also dozens of these tiny blue Glory of the Snow which actually came as part of the same collection with the Toronto ones. I can't wait to get more this fall and support this little collection to make it bigger next year!

Shiny Clean Oil Lamps

Mon, 11 May 2009 20:00:32 GMT

I'd been putting off cleaning this pair of old oil lamps for... years. In fact it has probably been decades, although I didn't personally own them that whole time! Finally I got around to it and it ended up taking all day. I soaked the glass parts in hot soapy water and came by once an hour or so to scrub them again. Mainly it was the inside that was toughest -- where old yellowed fuel had left sediments. I stuffed a white washrag inside and used a knife to manipulate it to scrub the indentations inside. Luckily while it took a long time, noticeable progress occurred each iteration so it wasn't frustrating at all.

What really took the elbow grease was polishing the brass. All parts had a very thick black coating, or greasy dark brown dots that took several polishings to remove. I thought I did a pretty good job but as I look at this picture I realize I missed the lowest part on the left hand one. LOL... I'll have to catch that separately I guess! I put in new wicks, but not fuel as these ones are just for emergencies. We have fuel for them in the basement.

Here's the one we use regularly, as erm... hehe... "mood lighting". It's way newer and we inherited it from the previous owners when we moved into our house in Colorado. The frosted glass shade (found separately on eBay) is real nice on the eyes. I cleaned this one out the same day as the other two but it didn't need as much. I noticed the brass on this one had way less copper in it than that of the others. Sign of the times I guess. They sell fuel for these for very cheap at WalMart. They also have scent oil you can put in. I think you are supposed to burn the scent oil directly but it comes in very small bottles so we add 2 bottles of that and fill the rest up with regular lamp kerosene to save loot. Mainly what the scent does is prevents kerosene stench from gassing the room after you blow the lamp out at night. LOL. So worth it!