On 3/2/2015 5:02 PM, ~misfit~ wrote:
Once upon a time on usenet George Shirley wrote:
On 2/28/2015 9:04 PM, ~misfit~ wrote:
Once upon a time on usenet Terry Coombs wrote:
George Shirley wrote:
Miserable morning, light mist falling, low forties temp, warmed up
some by 1500, 47f, no rain, some sunshine. There is hope that
spring may be just around the corner.
George

You call that miserable ? We got up to snow on the ground and low
20's , snowed all night and all morning and the roads are covered
and more of the same coming our way later this evening , I told the
wife to call in to work ... I grew up driving on snowy roads , but
the roads in this area get icy at a glance and a slide off the road
up here could end up slidin' off a mountain .
My seedlings are doing great , 'maters over 6" tall now . As soon
as we get a break in the weather I'll be bustin' butt to get my hot
box/mini-greenhouse built . I have a growing problem grin .

You call that miserable? Here just south of Auckland New Zealand
it's over 30ºC both outside and inside my house and very humid. It's
too hot to do any gardening other than the 'must do' things in this
weather like water the newly-grafted, newly sprouted citrus grafts
(on Flying Dragon rootstock to dwarf the trees).

I'll water the tomatoes etc. after midnight when it's cool enough to
move a bit without sweating so much I have to shower every other
hour. I'd really like to be gardening, instead I'm sat here in front of a
fan. It's too hot to even finishing up my LED growlight that I'm
making. I've soldered the emitters onto 'star' bases, marked,
drilled and tapped the hestsink they'll be screwed to - I just need
to solder all the wires to each emitter and back to a connector and
do final assembly with heat transfer paste. However I don't want to
be weilding a 400ºC soldering iron in this weather.

I've finally decided I have to have a decent energy efficient grow
light. Not so much for starting seedlings but for rooting cuttings.
With these hotter summers of late it's very difficult to regulate
the right amount of light for cuttings in a 'humidity chamber' using
the sun as a source without them getting far too hot.

I've wasted a lot of time this season taking (mainly tree) cuttings
and trying to get them to root only to have them wilt and/or rot. It
never used to be like this! Next season I'm going to use the
growlight for some and air-layer others. Air-layering works really
well but it's far more work than cut, snip, dip and pot. :-/

You poor soul, I've been walking around all day in long sweat pants, a
long-sleeved shirt, and a sweater on. While working on the blueberry
blossoms I was also wearing a nice coat and my Peruvian beret, knitted
from llama wool, and was still cold. I miss the Arabian Peninsula and
the 125F days and 90F nights.

I'll take too cold over too hot (for comfort) any day of the week. It's
easier (and legal!) to keep putting clothes on than keep taking them off.
It's can sometimes afford a bit of heat in my home - there's no AC.

I was grafting rose bushes in the growing field when I was twelve,
that was enough for me, haven't done a lot of grafting since except
for a couple of pear trees a few years ago. I generally air layer for
various rosemary plants.

A few pleasant years of my youth were spent working in vineyards and
wineries and I spent many a day at the grafting benches, bench-grafting wine
grape varieties onto phyloxera resistant rootstocks. That was over 30 years
ago and I haven't grafted since. Bud grafting is a whole other ball-game to
bench grafting.
That's exactly why the family friend who owned the rose farm hired young
boys, eleven to thirteen years old. Older boys in their late teens
carried a two by twelve board down the rows, bent the bushes over, young
guys did the bud graft and wrapped a powdered rubber band above and
below the graft. I got 25 cents an hour US plus room and board. Big meal
of the day was noon, called "dinner." Came back to the farm house around
noon, all kinds of home grown, home cooked with care, food. Hams,
chickens, turkey's, all sorts of vegetables and desserts. After dinner
we laid under the shade trees and rested for two hours then back to the
field. Big breakfast in the morning, small supper when work stopped for
the day. I grew two inches taller and twenty lbs heavier that summer.
Put some muscle on too. Folks that owned the rose farm had been friends
with my parents since they were very young. Good people, long gone.

Your LED grow light sounds handy for what you need. I am slowly moving
to LED everywhere on the property for better efficiency, longer life,
and lower electric bills.

Every source of light in my home is LED and has been for a couple of years
now. The council even replaced the old sodium-vapour street light outside my
place with an LED street light a few weeks back. It's amazing, instead of
there being a circular pool of orange light that shone as much onto my
bedroom curtains as anywhere there's directed white light onto the road and
footpaths. I asked to see the light as they were replacing it because I'm
nosy. g

It has a very clever system of TIR optics that directs the light evenly
below the light and up and down the street, there's almost no spill-over
off-road on either side. Also, as there's no light shining upwards (or even
horizontally, the LEDs are recessed) I get to see the stars again! The lamp
they removed was an 80w unit, dull and ugly. The replacement LED lamp is 32w
(16 x 2w emmiters powered by a Philips potted 32w driver) and it lights the
areas that need to be lit so much better. There isn't the large pools of
darkness between lamps any more. Brilliant!

We still have mercury vapor lights along our streets. The only progress
they made with them was to put detectors at street level so if you
walked or drove by the street light goes on and then turns off three
minutes later. Since our subdivision has to pay the light bill we like
it that way.