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Saturday in the garden
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 30șC 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 400șC 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. |
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