12:45 – Barbara is home. Colin and I are delighted. Both of us were so happy when she got home that we almost peed on the floor.
We’re taking it easy over the long holiday weekend. We did go out this morning to stake out the future garden area. At Barbara’s suggestion, we’re keeping it small to start with. We decided on a plot that’s 15×20 feet, 300 square feet, about 10 square meters, or about 0.007 acres. That’s not very large, but it’s large enough to grow more vegetables than we’ll eat. As Barbara said, we can always make it larger if we need to.
We put it on the left (south) side of the house as you’re facing it, with the near edge only four or five feet from the house. That way, if we fence it, which we probably will, we can use the side of the house as one side of the fence. The plot is sloped enough for good drainage, and gets full sunlight from morning to evening. Once we get it tilled, we’ll send off a soil sample to the agricultural extension folks to have it analyzed to determine what it needs in the way of nutrients, pH adjustment, and so on.
“Once we get it tilled, we’ll send off a soil sample to the agricultural extension folks to have it analyzed to determine what it needs in the way of nutrients, pH adjustment, and so on.”
Good deal. Fair warning: be prepared for LOTS of work out there. We’ve just started again on our tiny little space here and already my back and knees have rebelled. We’re taking it easy over this holiday weekend, too, because it’s too dang HOT! Temps floating around 90 and VERY humid. I blame Algore and Twelve Years of Reagan-Bush.
Don’t you just throw seeds out and stuff grows? Like in the movies?
That actually sometimes works pretty well, but we wouldn’t count on it. We’ve also seen stuff come up that we have no idea where it came from or how it got there.
T-storms about to roll across Lake Champlain from the Saranac Lake area of NY, waterfront in Burlap has been “evacuated.” Getting darker here…
Raised beds! Potting soil so you have a good start, no tilling involved. The raised parry helps with knees and back.
N
whopper t-storm–power out–trees down–scanner all static
In Square Foot Gardening Mel Bartholomew recommends filling raised beds with 1/3 vermiculite, 1/3 compost and 1/3 peat moss.
Speaking solely for myself, I find that everything shown in movies works perfectly when I try it, and in fact movies are an excellent guide to life. Following the guidance of action movies, I can launch my car off a ramp, roll in the air, and land on all four tires, and the front end won’t bend up and the engine won’t drop right out. And if there’s a girl I like, I can just follow her around and leave little notes where she’ll find them and even if she acts like she’s not interested all I have to do is keep at it and eventually I’ll get the girl and not be arrested for stalking. And DNA evidence gathered by a bystander, such as from a pencil the suspect touched, can be sequenced in seconds and is 100% accurate and the government has a complete DNA dossier on everyone in the world and matches can be made with no false positives and no false negatives.
I’ve been building raised beds, one to three each year since 2008. 2 x 8 x 8 feet cheap pine, cut one in half to make ends, 4′ by 8′, 3 1/2 “deck screws pretrial. Dig out 6 “, then layer leaves, soil, till with small electric tiller, soil, mulch, peat moss, till, repeat. Add 4 to 8 cups pellitised chicken or turkey manure or Bag of cow manure mulch to top 4″. First year build lots of work, thereafter easy. Wife’s back and knees happy, I’m happy! MinnesotaDave. Probably similar climate to Vermont. Lots of rocks, 1/2 ” sieve.
Power still out & earlier wind gusts @ 70-80 mph. Zero warning 4 this & street closed & FD & other crews still here; tree down on cah across from us. Our 2nd lilac tree down.
@nick, are you high and dry?
Looks like we are going to start a levee and high ground test in Fort Bend County come Tuesday. All the way to the Gulf of Mexico.
http://water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph.php?wfo=HGX&gage=RMOT2
We have had 50 inches of rain on Houston so far this year. I wonder if we are moving from subtropical to tropical weather?
Two cities have been evacuated in Fort Bend County so far. Here’s hoping that it stops there. Plus the supposed new record that the Brazos will set of 3 ft higher than “ever”.
WRT weather: The National Weather Service has become extremely inept and inaccurate, getting more so each year as they rely more and more on computers. The computers even alter the radar images, inaccurately. Typical gobberment broke-aucracy.
Look at the sky, know your clouds, trust your aches, pains, and sinuses. Be sure to watch what the animals are doing, you can learn a lot from the birds and squirrels. Many dogs are real good weather predictors too, cats not so much (and I am a cat lover).
Hope all stays safe for you @OFD. You too @Lynn and @nick.
WRT raised beds, I made a rock sieve out of some 2×4 (made a 2’x3′ frame that fit over my wheelbarrow) and 1/4-inch hardware cloth to de-rock my soil when I was doing the original double digging in my raised beds. Double dug in leaves, straw, and chicken manure.
@Lynn, holy cr@p, didn’t know that was coming.
Let’s hope they get it wrong this time.
I’m fine here, but the flooding affects the whole city.
WRT the shooters <- plural, I got some first and second hand accounts that don't make sense. I'm gonna mention them here only as a way to get on the record.
Some of the area residence described the shooters as attempting to rob the bank, which would make this a robbery gone wrong. One of the kids that works where I was this afternoon lives only a few hundred feet away, and saw one of the guys get shot. He was a bit shaken up. One family was on vacation but their boat got shot up since they live RIGHT THERE. One of our members was texting that family today. There were witness reports that the shooters were asking people their religion, and letting christians go. I don't know enough about the time line to judge whether any of these reports even make sense.
There was almost no media reporting and is still little for the magnitude of the event, so I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that they are holding back in case it was mooslim terrorism.
Every business in the area should have dozens of cams. If they don't release footage, I'll get suspicious.
I expect a lot of wailing for gun control, already see the ARs described as assault rifles and "very powerful" rifles. We'll see. So far, none of it makes sense.
nick
(the injured deputies are in the same precinct that I did my class with, so maybe I'll hear something thru that.)
You might want to have an equal area tilled, but allow for paths every few feet. So, perhaps three 5×20 foot beds, with a 2 or 3 foot space between them. (or perhaps six 5X10 foot beds, in a plot 20×25 feet.) That will allow you to walk between the beds without walking IN the beds. And you can easily reach 2.5 feet into the bed to pick your tomatoes and peppers from one side of the bed or the other.
I’m actually a big fan of raised beds; before our California drought made gardening impractical, I did pretty well with four 4×5 foot raised beds 18 inches high. Now it’s easier to drive down to the local farmer’s market.
I made my raised beds with the generic equivalent of Trex decking. I originally found some in the clearance bin at lowes, and last year when I expanded, I found a bunch on craigslist. I 1/4 notched the ends so they would interlock like a lincoln log set. They were essentially 2×6 x 20 ft boards. They are dark brown and look good, will never rot, and have only limited fade. They shouldn’t leach anything into the soil either.
I made the big one that is prominent in the back yard multi level with an herb area at the patio end, mainly to please my wife, but it looks good and I’m happy with it, especially since I got the grape arbor added. (I don’t love the visual design of the arbor, but it’s up and done, and will be covered with grape vines eventually.)
I don’t have the soil right though for what I’ve been trying to grow, except in the bed with the carrots. They did fantastically. Hence my admonition to ‘get started’! and try it out.
nick
So I’ve had a chance to watch some of the news coverage and NONE of it matches what the initial eyewitness reports were.
From the TV, it’s just a guy at a business who starts shooting for no reason. Took his car to the detail shop, started shooting shortly after. over 150 shots fired, 21 into the initial responding officer’s car, 5 at the HPD chopper. Went on for an hour…
nick
Following a bank robbery around 1990 in which the bad guys got away, the TV news said the suspects were “heavily armed with 9mm and .357 caliber pistols”.
When I lived in the Cleveland area in the mid-70’s, TV news reported “a sniper with a shotgun”.
Compared to those liberal reporters, I’m heavily armed, and the only weapon I have is my wit.
I’ve often joked that when I snap, I’m going to shoot a bunch of people with a low powered rifle, just to confuse the hell out of the media. My friends know to be on the lookout for the mistakes.
You should shoot people with a rubber band gun. A black rubber band gun with a pistol grip and shoulder sling. Check all of the boxes of what makes an evil firearm, except for the firearm part.
No shooters around here that I know of, but BIG excitement anyway in Saint Albans Bay:
http://www.wcax.com/story/32093340/powerful-wind-gusts-take-out-trees-utility-poles-in-st-albans-town
This all went down on the next street over from us and power didn’t come back until nearly midnight. The wind gusts we saw when this thing hit were the most powerful either of us has ever seen in our combined forty years in Vermont. Easily strong-gale-force and 9 on the Beaufort Scale. Sheets of rain billowing sideways across the village and nearly zero visibility. Trees down and branches all over the place, plus half a dozen telephone poles down and cables and wires all over the roads.
We had ZERO warning for this.
Not a huge problem for us as we have candles, lanterns, and the radios; scanners had intermittent lucidity but a LOT of static; I gotta look into that. Regular AM/FM was fine. A longer outage would be a hassle with the fridge but that’s about it; this was a small wakeup call for me, though, to site a ground-floor position for the FLASHLIGHTS, batteries, first-aid kit, headlamps, etc. Currently they’re in several different locations, which is tres stupido.
It’s also clear to me that a much longer outage would have us right back to 1900 seasonal agriculture time, where we get up with first light and hit the sack not too long after sunset.
Those power poles would NEVER have been knocked down if y’all have 240V power over there.
The FEMA daily brief for today (Mon) has the following summary:
Significant Events: Severe Weather/Flooding
Tropical Activity:
•Atlantic: Tropical Depression Bonnie
•Pacific: Tropical Depression 1 & 2
Significant Weather:
•Severe Thunderstorms – Northern & Central Plains
•Rain and Thunderstorms – Central Great Basin, Northern/Central and Southern Rockies over to the Great Lakes, Middle/Lower Mississippi
Valleys and the entire Eastern Seaboard
•Flash Flooding possible – Northern and Central Plains & the Eastern U.S.
•Rain/Snow – Pacific Northwest & Southwest
•Red Flag Warnings – None
•Elevated Fire Weather – None
•Space Weather – None in the past 24 hours; Minor, G1 geomagnetic storms predicted for the next 24 hours
Earthquake Activity: No significant activity
Declaration Activity: None
So it looks like everyone BUT Texas is getting hammered! WHooray for us!
Y’all stay safe…..
nick