wiredfool

As amazing as it sounds, I think that the next thing to to in the garden is hang around and wait for a couple of weeks to plant some more stuff. The March salad bed is in, the March potatoes are in, and the beds for the next batch of planting are in pretty good shape. I may throw out some cover crop to crowd out the weeds germination, but there’s just not that much more heavy lifting that needs to happen for the near future.

Also: take pictures. Been too busy working to take pics of the garden.

Way back when I was first on the internet, before these blog things, people talked on usenet, and some people talked a lot on usenet. I was a part of the bicycling community at rec.bicycles.tech, and I remember the contributions of Sheldon Brown. (I think I remember 3 or 4 names from that era now.) He always had an answer, and almost always had the part you needed. He built some crazy tandems and fixed gears, welded together out of whatever junkers crossed his path. I ordered a few things from hish shop, and I think even biked by it once while I was in the area.

I left that community for the web, or it disappeared, or something around the time of the 1999 internet boom, so I never knew that Sheldon Brown had MS, or that he was in failing health. He died last month.

Sheldon Brown obituary – Times Online

Our garden has been humming along, until it hit a full stop last Saturday. Two weeks ago, we rented a big roto-tiller (two cylinder, 16hp. Now that’s power) and attacked the mess of gourse and blackberry roots in our large garden location, as well as a killing off the sod in a couple of other spots (one called and shaped like nevada, one like a pie wedge) for some other garden uses.

Last Friday evening and Saturday, I defined the beds in the big garden, and then put in one load of compost over half the garden. Then, stoppage struck, as the compost loading tractor wouldn’t start when I went back for the second load, and half the family got quite sick, and remained that way for most of the week.

The big garden is a rectangle, with 16 3 foot wide beds on each side of a center aisle, each bed about 10 – 14 feet long. There are some smaller ones on the north side, and the ones on the south side tend to be on the longer side. At about 30-40 square foot per bed, there’s a good amount of space for smaller stuff, and there are enough beds to give the bigger stuff its space as well.

Helpfully, I had put the compost into the ‘later in the summer’ area of the garden first, and not where I was planning on putting the early season stuff. One more trip to the compost place, no luck — they’re out for 2 more weeks. So. Garden plans are reversed, and I’m now planting early season where I intended later season stuff.

So, Today (Saturday) I mixed up the fertilizer (following Steve Solomon’s complete organic recipe — 4x seed meal, 1/2x lime, 1/2x rock phosphate, 1/2x kelp meal) raked it into the 8 beds, and planted the first seeds (and starts). There’s a bed of Walla Walla onion starts, a bed of chard, one of peas, and one of favas. Ben has a garden bed of his own with radishes, peas, and onions. Tomorrow we’re expecting to put in a bed of spinach and lettuce, and 2 of potatoes.

Next month, we’ll start more peas, more potatoes, more salad stuff, and probably some brassicas.

In May, another batch of potatoes, more salad stuff, and who knows what else. Probably beans.

Memorial day, we go for hot weather loving plants, tomatoes and peppers. Sweet Corn too, in the nevada plot.

And in mid summer, in go the overwintering things, more brassicas, leeks, favas.

Obviously, there are big plans here, but I think we’re past a large part of the early work.

The recent, possibly unprecedented, run of good weather in February has gotten us off our couches and out into the yard. And the yard looks a lot different than before.

– Last Friday – On couches, sick.
– Saturday – Feeling a little better — decided to go shopping, it was less effort than working in the yard. Bought 6 fruit trees and rented a weedwacker. Left trees at the nursery.
– Sunday – whacked weeds. With a gas powered weed whacker with a blade. That’s power. Also took on gourse and blackberries by sticking the whirring blade in and wiggling it around. Felt a little like wielding a sword. Also dug a hole or two.
– Monday – Looked around at the devastation, dug another hole and met neighbor. Neighbor seems to not like trees, or at least, very willing to cut them down. Decided to cut down a large alder tree before it fell on the trees to be planted. Attacked tree with an axe and chainsaw. Tree trunk is now in little bits, branches strewn across the garden. Now that’s power.
– Tuesday – Pulled little branches off of big branches by hand. Now that’s really bad wood.
– Wednesday – More of that. Now there are a couple piles of little branches, a couple of bigger ones, and 1/3 cord of trunk rounds.
– Friday – Decided that perhaps it’s time to plant trees, so dug more holes.
– Saturday – Got trees, planted them, Pruned them. Now they’re smaller trees, with spreaders to make the branches grow in the right direction. Also, built a fire and had two large piles of small branches fed to the fire. Suddenly, the tree seems mostly gone. Also, found out that one good hit with the axe would cut up to a 2-3″ branch. Had loads of fun whacking them into stove sized pieces.
– Sunday – Rested.

Next weekend — A rototiller.

Just got back from the Democratic Caucus. I was stunned by the turnout, I’d estimate over 1000 people showed up from the south end of our little island. It was crowded. Parking was an issue. I saw a whole bunch of people I know. Friends, Neighbors, Barristas, The guy who sold me the truck. I’d chalk it up as a success.

Of the three precincts results that I heard, each was 2:1 for Obama. That aligns pretty well with the preponderance of buttons and signs, so I’d guess that it’s pretty consistent over the other precincts that met there.

Wind’s up, Power is flickering, so I’ve shut down the non-laptop computers in my office. I’d leave them on, but the power will probably drop when I’m not around to turn them off, so I’d just run down the ups for nothing. The router now has a fresh new ups, so we should have a good 12 hours or more of internet while the power is down before that one runs out.

We actually lost a few small dead trees with yesterday morning’s little wind. They were 6-8″ firs which appear to have been dead, judging from the rot around the base when they finally went over. But, helpfully enough, they didn’t fall cleanly. Each one was leaning somewhat precariously against another tree — mostly upright and retaining a lot of potential energy. Not the sort of thing that I want outside when there are kiddos running around. Some whacks with the axe, some pulling and shoving got them on the ground. They’ll do nicely in the wood stove one of these days.

Update — Oddly enough, we didn’t lose power.

I’m going to diverge from the recent string of pictures and the occasional words for some politics.

Barack Obama has my vote, and to make sure it counts, I’m going to the caucus this weekend. The caucus is a first — I don’t normally like associating closely with political parties, but this time, it’s just that important.

To start out, any of the Democratic candidates would be better than any of the Republicans. W and his ilk have spoiled the whole party, and they’re working on the country.

I think the Obama candidacy is a risk — he’s fresh meat for the political grinder. I don’t see him fighting as dirty as the others. Clinton has been through this to see the worst of what the Republicans can do. That experience may be useful.

But balancing that risk is an upside — I believe that we have a chance for a once in a generation sort of Presidency, and I think that Obama is the one who could pull that off. His win would be a mandate to undo the damage of the last 8 years. That would be more valuable than any years of what Clinton could give us.

Obama knows what is in the Constitution. He taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. He agrees that the current administration has been overstepping it’s bounds. And he knows what a bubble sort is and when not to use it. That’s as good as playing the sax for geeks.

This is a country without kings and dynasties, I don’t believe that having another Clinton in the White House would be good for this country. There has been a Bush or Clinton as President or Vice President since I was in first grade. It’s time for that to change.

Hope is a choice, not a sum. You can have as much as you damn well feel like having, regardless of the actual circumstances. (Matt Ruff, Sewer, Gas and Electric)

So, chalk one up for hope. I’m going to be at the High School, 1pm on Saturday to be a part of the caucus.

So one of my new year’s goals was to start working with sourdough bread. So, on the first, I started a couple of starters. Yesterday, one of them got to the doubling in 24 hours stage, and then today it got to the doubling in 8 hours, so — time to start some bread.

I’m trying a 1/2 white, 1/2 wheat sourdough with a touch of honey from the King Arthur Whole grain book. I’m planning on letting it go through a slow rise or retard tonight, and then bake it tomorrow. Pictures to come…

Update — So the bread is good, a little moist, probably could have baked for another few minutes. Also, it could have risen for a while longer, I was kind of going on time, but the house is pretty cold for bread in the winter, at least away from the stove. Flavor was good, a nice hearty wheaty flavor, but not overly sour. I think this would be really good at 1/4 whole wheat, possibly even approaching the flavor of the Essential Fremont. If I can get close to that, I will consider myself successful.

We’ve had a couple of little power hiccups, one after a flash and a bang nearby, and one that just killed power for long enough to drop the router and non-UPS enabled computers.

Not really expecting the power to be out long tonight, since the forcast is for 30-40 mph winds from the SW, which for us not terribly high speed, and we’re protected by some hills. But I’m shutting down the ups connected machines anyway, to preserve power for the coffee grinder if we should need it.

Update — 6.1/2 hours out, all while we were sleeping. That was pretty painless.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of tools is in need of something to take apart.

Last week, just before the big wind storm that battered Western Washington, our dishwasher decided that it was time for a little attention. Thankfully, I only had the help of one kid and one cat to work on it.

if you have a Kitchenaid Ultraquiet dishwasher (that only really matches the description when it’s off, but I digress) and the water isn’t draining from the bottom, there are a couple of things to check before you take all the bits under the sink apart like I did.

If:

– The motor runs and it sounds like it’s trying to pump the water out
– And you don’t hear gurgling from the air gap

Then: You likely have a clog in the air gap, and probably not in the line. If your air gap is a little silver thingy sticking up from the back of the sink, it’s entirely probable that you can take apart the bits above the counter, clean it out, and get working again. (Without taking it out of the sink, disconnecting all the hoses, leaking all over the place, and then realizing that you need to take apart the bit you had access to all along). Once the impacted bits of gunk are removed, things will drain a lot better.

If you don’t have the little silver thingy, then it’s probably dumping into a disposal or something under the sink, and you’ll need to attack it there.

And then there’s the wood stove. We’d noticed a bit of a wood smokey smell for a little while, but then Saturday, just before visitors arrived, smoke started pouring out of the flue pipe into the living room. Yay. The electric heat here isn’t exactly up to keeping the house as nicely warm as the stove, and it’s really expensive too.

But that turns out to be a pretty easy fix as well, once you get up onto the roof and pull off the chimney cap. Thankfully, we have someone who can do that for us. There was a lot of built up gunk there which needed to be brushed off — once done, the stove draws strongly again, and no smoke in the living room.