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Saturday in the garden
Once upon a time on usenet George Shirley wrote:
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. Sounds like one of those summers that that go a long way to defining a developing young person. 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. I live on a cul-de-sac in the 'bad' part of town (read; cheapest rents). I needed somewhere to rent after my injury when I lost my business and the house I'd been paying a mortgage on for a couple of years. The Invalid's Benefit is quite low and really I should have moved into a flat but I wanted a garden and space between me and neighbours so moved here. When I moved into this house there was a mercury vapour street light outside. The Streetlight is right outside my gate, about 15 - 20m from my bedroom window. That wasn't so bad, it was a 50w unit and threw out a white light. It illuminated my curtains a little but wasn't enough to upset my sleep. When it went out about seven years ago I rang the local council and told them the lamp need replacing. However they replaced the whole 'head' and it was an 80w High Pressure Sodium lamp. Yuk! Orange light that lit up my bedroom and forced me to buy thicker curtains. Now, with the LED lamp there is almost no light hitting my curtains but the street and footpath are lit with bright white light, it's a massive improvement. The light is directed so that it shines up the roiad ~50m either side. The gateway at the end of my drive is also illuminated so I can see it but, progressing across my front lawn it goes from bright to dark in ~5m. Such a difference compared with the previous lamps that had a bright bulb hanging below them surrounded by a clear pastic 'bubble' and which shone light randomly everywhere and left big dark areas between lamps. I was given the install spec sheet from the council guy and this lamp is made by a New Zealand company. They are very good indeed. I couldn't find a website for them however. Hmmm, I just Googled again only this time using the lamp model number as well as their name and found this page; http://www.betacom.co.nz/assets/GL520_0314.pdf this lamp outside my place has optic 7032. I was wrong about the number of LEDs too, I thought it was 16 but the pdf says 24. (It was early morning when I saw it, I was only half-awake and the workmen didn't exactly hold the lamp still for me to examine for long.) They use high-quality components (Cree and Philips) so the lamps should have a working life of decades, using about half the power of previous lights but providing twice the brightness and spreading it sideways towards the next light so there is less of a light / dark effect that the old lamps gave. 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. We don't pay for the lighting directly but it comes out of rates, and ultimately in my case rent. I wouldn't like it if the lights were going on and off all night. As someone who's struggled with insomnia all my life that would drive me to distraction rather than sleep. Also, as I live in a.... 'low socio-economic area' there is a lot of crime it's great to be able to look out the window (or at the CCTV monitor) if you hear a noise. From what you say above it sounds like you live in a 'better' area, maybe a gated community? Most of this town has had its streetlights replaced with LED lamps now and it's a startling improvement whether you live in a street or drive around at night. Of all of the things I like about these lamps the fact that they don't spill light sideways / upwards so that I can stand on my front deck and see the stars now. (I remember hearing a while back that the New Zealand government had decided they were going to combat light pollution. Being an island nation we mostly have very clear skies and the night sky is really a sight to behold. Most visitors to NZ mention it.) Gosh, I wrote more than I inteded. Time to go to the pharmacy and get my pain meds. They are so tightly controlled so as to try to avoid misuse / diversion that the maximum anyone can pick up at one time is 10 days supply. That got old five years ago! -- Shaun. "Humans will have advanced a long, long, way when religious belief has a cozy little classification in the DSM." David Melville (in r.a.s.f1) |
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