Scratch Another Project Off the List

Spring bangs its drum to wake up the sun.

Angel & I spent hours outdoors today. She focused on spring cleanup of flower beds. The various weeds, local and exotic, encroach on plantings during the mild, wet winters. As a result of her ministrations, areas that were overgrown now look open. The flowers and shrubs have room to grow. The rhodedendrons between our house and the neighbors to the west look especially pretty.

Last year I rented a shredder/chipper to turn vast amounts of bark into mulch. It was a hot, messy, exhausting job, but I did end up with a large pile of finely shredded bark.

Before the winter, as an experiment, I piled a fair amount of that shredded bark atop some landscape fabric on the south side of the house. Storms came. Wind blew hard. The shredded bark moved around a little, but not too much. Some weeds poked up through the fabric, but not too many. Thus, the experiment indicates my homemade bark will stay put and perform well as mulch.

So today, I completed a big, mulched border beneath the basement windows on the south and east sides of the house. The area is four feet wide on the south side and three feet wide on the east side. It's, oh I don't know, forty or fifty feet long.

I edged it with rocks... volleyball-sized down to fist size. That holds down the fabric at the boundaries and helps contain the mulch. It looks great, and now when the rains come, water will not splash on the stucco.

I have a lot of rocks. You may remember that I've been hauling rocks to a staging area near our big firewood stacks. These rocks range in size from gravel to boulders too heavy to move by myself. It's great fun to use these in landscape projects. It's very satisfying to use bark that I shredded for mulch. The end result is attractive and the only part that we purchased is the landscape fabric.

I also "did the compost" and picked up more rocks from various parts of the property. Need to keep my rock supply up. Who knows? Maybe someday I'll build a Zen rock garden. Or not.

Knees ache. Elbows ache, but the property took a step up in landscape dimension.

Drip Components Ordered

Well, after futzing with the water supply in the greenhouse for a few days, I think I've got a hose bib and a "T" pushed through the wall of the greenhouse. There's a slight drip -- a couple of them actually -- in some of the connections between dissimilar materials (metal-to-plastic) but according to the USGS estimate of one drip = a quarter milliliter, that only amounts to about 12 gallons per year. Actually it's about 9 gallons per year because I shut the water to the greenhouse off from mid Nov through mid Feb.

I put a yoghurt container beneath the worst offender (less than a third of a drip per minute) and will use that to water plants in the greenhouse. Actually I'm hoping that there will be enough minerals in the water to plug these tiny gaps over the coming months. I've seen that happen.

I'll connect a drip irrigation "assembly" (vacuum breaker + check valve + filter + pressure regulator + assorted transition fittings and an in-line valve or two) to the T that I've brought to the outside of the greenhouse. The assembly will drive a header that in turn feeds ten "laterals" of drip tubing w/ in-line emitters. Each emitter is 1/2 a gallon per hour. Each lateral will be about 22 feet long (i.e. 11 gallons per hour per lateral). So that means the upper garden drip system will output 110 GPH. The header tubing can supply 480 GPH. The drip tubing can operate at pressures of 10 - 50 psi. The pressure regulator I picked has an output value of 30 psi.

In other words, the Old Amigo thinks he'll neither parch nor explode his drip system when he turns the water on.

I think an hour every other day will probably suffice for a well-mulched garden. That works out to 1650 gallons per month, roughly. I hope I can keep the soil moist with less than that, but we'll see. This system has the virtue of being fairly easy to dismantle for garden winterization and spring cultivation.

I'm also putting a "Y" hose fitting on the output of the assembly so that I'll be able to feed another drip system in the lower vegetable garden, but I'll want to debug the main garden before I tackle that.

Today I ordered most of my connectors and fittings from http://dripworks.com/ (recommended by an organic farmer, whom I know slightly, down in Chimicum).

The guy at dripworks seemed knowledgeable and "into" it. Said I should get my stuff early next week. I'll have to buy a few other items from the local hardware store, but that's okay. For simple, basic plumbing bits, the local guys are actually pretty competitive. They were more than 2x the cost of the in-line emitter drip tubing, however, and that tubing represents more than half the cost of my drip system (including the lower garden).

That's the garden story... for today anyway.

Guarantee

...from the You Can't Just Make this Stuff Up department...

My friend D borrowed my tree pruners. They're very old. I don't know how old. They belonged to my dad. A year or so after Dad died (roughly ten years ago) I found them in his garage and thought, "I can use those." They were beat up then but they worked.

Angel and I hauled the pruners to the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains when we moved there. We hauled the pruners to the edge of the continent when we moved to the 48th parallel. They leaned against some shelves in our garage, and like I said, D borrowed them. Last week. He's got some really nice (and very tall) fruit trees, and this is pruning time... past pruning time for some trees, even.

So D was pruning away happily. Then he stopped to speak for a moment to his elderly neighbor. He laid the pruners on elderly neighbor's driveway. Then he was interrupted by a phone call. Then, somewhat suddenly, someone came to elderly neighbor's house in a car. That someone hurried into the driveway and drove over my pruners. Long extension pole bent into pretzel-hood. Saw crooked. Loppers out of whack.

Now these are Sears Craftsman pruners. D, being a good guy, wanted to buy me a new set to replace the ones that had so badly lost their fight with a motor vehicle. He called Sears. The nearest Sears is in the next town over... oh, about forty minutes away in good weather. The conversation went roughly as follows:

"Hi. I'm calling from the village at the edge of the continent. Do you carry 12 foot tree pruners?"

"Hi. No, sorry, we only carry the 14 foot model now."

"Oh. Well, okay. My old 12 footers were run over by a car. If you have a 14 foot model in stock, I'll drive over and pick one up."

"Okay. That's fine, but... are these Craftsman tree pruners?"

"Yes, they are."

"You said they're old. Can they still be identified as Craftsman tree pruners?"

"Well, yes, they can."

"Then bring the pruners over and we'll swap them out. That's the Craftsman guarantee. If it fails any time for any reason, we replace it. Even if you run over it with a car."

My friend D did just that. Now the Old Amigo has a new set of pruners. I like that guarantee. I understand that Sears stock is up lately. Perhaps there is some corporate karma involved.

I'd like to think so.

Garden Prep

Yesterday I spread (roughly) a cubic yard of freshly-cooked compost over our main garden area. Then I turned over the whole plot - about 350 square feet. This upended the winter rye cover crop. The soil looks good; although there is quite a bit of variation. Some areas are slightly more sandy and other areas have more of a heavy, clay-like texture.

According to the Pacific Northwest Garden Guide, I should now be working on getting the soil warmed up. I should also do something to keep the spring rains off the garden. The soil, after all, should be moist. Right now it is heavy and soggy. Our forecast calls for four days of sun, however, so by Sunday, things should be good!

Since we're planning to move to a drip irrigation system for (at least) the main garden, my next project involves bringing a hose bib out through the wall of the greenhouse. The Old Amigo is a tad nervous about tackling the plumbing, but the line to the greenhouse has its own shutoff. That at least will prevent serious disruption to the main water supply.

Oh, and I picked up a copy of an excellent book on drip irrigation. It's called (remarkably enough) Drip Irrigation for Every Landscape and All Climates. The author is Robert Kourik. I ordered my copy from Barnes & Noble.

House Reassembled

Angel and I really cranked last weekend. My former office is now the guest bedroom. The guest quarters over the garage have become Angel's office and the stockroom for most of the 'tini Beauty inventory. Packing happens there too. I've occupied the space that formerly housed Angel's office on the main floor.

Both the new, downstairs guest room and my new office have lovely new closets. So these rooms may truly be considered as bedrooms.

I love my new office. It's got great light and it's warm. While it's smaller than the new, downstairs guest quarters, it is definitely adequate to my needs. Angel loves her new space too. She is no longer crammed into a too-small space. She has a stainless steel-topped table for her work surface.

The house "works" better all around now.

Around the Garden

The path around the main vegetable garden is in. I think it looks pretty good; although (naturally) there are some adjustments here-and-there that remain. At any rate, it is very nice to walk around the area without stepping into the mud. Also - and this is an unanticipated side-benefit - the path defines the space more clearly. The flower beds along the west edge are more visible. The space between the deck and the path could obviously accommodate some ground cover, some flowers, or perhaps a small raised bed or row of pots.

Also, a big batch of compost is pretty well cooked. According to the garden guide for our region, this is a fine time to turn in soil amendments and get serious about other prep work. Soooo.... the plan is my big batch of compost will be turned into the soil (along with the cover crop of winter rye) this weekend. Then I'd like to put plastic sheeting on my net hoops - PVC pipe framework that "quonset huts" itself over most of the garden - for a couple of weeks to keep off the rain and warm the soil. That's a lot of work, BTW, and it will depend on the weather Sat & Sun. Today's forecast for the weekend is not auspicious, but things change.

Finally, we're hoping to introduce some labor-saving and (if I think I can afford the capitol outlay) some water saving systems this year. I've begun gathering clean cardboard to form heavy mulch between the rows. That should keep down the weeds. And I'd very much like to put in some kind of drip irrigation system. That would put the water on the vegetable plants and hamper weed growth: an impressive two-fer!

The Hyphen Nation

An idea has emerged over the past several weeks. It stems in part from the collapse, beneath megatons of misinformation and fear-mongering from the Right, of the Federal health care initiative. That sad but predictable result is only part of the genesis of the idea.

Here are a few - a very few - items that also fit into the model:

• Local people grown complain about taxes to fund schools. Their kids are grown.
• "Religious Leaders" push political agendas while their organizations retain tax-exempt status.
• Unions threaten important legislation unless said legislation includes provisions that guarantee work be done by union labor.
• Free market idealogues combat any and all efforts to protect workers.
• Those most able to contribute to the support the society as a whole are focused on shirking their responsibility.
• And now the US Supreme Court has enshrined Big Money as the driver of all things electorial.

I fear we have become the Hyphen-Nation.

We used to be Americans. Now we are -Americans. Most of us fall into the trap. We've identified ourselves with a profession, a religion, a political movement, a race or culture first and then, as a secondary characteristic, we say that we are Americans.

This leads us to promote the goals or ideals of our primary association over those of our society. We focus on what we might get out of any situation and gloss over its wider implications. Our town, our block, our church, our ethnic group, our profession. This mental model seems rampant, and mainstream media promotes this thinking.

And of course this means that our children will have to deal with an ever more fragmented and dysfunctional society. It means that honest people at all levels of government - and I remain convinced that most people in government are indeed trying to do their best - will be less and less able to cope with the strident, conflicting, unyielding demands of their constituents. We see already that the brigands of Wall Street buy-buy-buy when it appears that political events have paralyzed the Federal Government.

Putting the needs of the many at the forefront has been eclipsed by "What's in it for me?" thinking. This is the concept of the Tragedy of the Commons writ large. The Right Wing-nuts will answer this by saying something like "Privatization - private ownership of the commons - is the solution." The Left Wing-nuts will answer this by saying something like "Centralization - Federal stewardship, central planning - is the solution."

So I ask: how do we step back from this? My thought is that any solution must come from individuals thinking constructively rather than exploitively about the larger society. We call this "Systems Thinking". No political philosophy (including that political philosophy which denies the validity of any form of government) will fix this for us. It is up to us to figure it out.

Interesting times.