Dandy chow last night – fresh mung bean sprouts – a broiled NY strip – and red wine. Today? Well, don’t worry – I will be working it off with the lawnmower. And the string trimmer. And the vinegar pumper to kill edges. About 10 seconds after this posts. Maybe 30 with more coffee.
What Expansion Plans?
I have to admit that I didn’t think anything could be as much fun as ham radio. But, truth be told, a few fresh sprouts and whatever else comes from the garden, is SO head and shoulders over “store bought” we wonder how stores even get along.
But – people are lazy – and there are a few people unwilling to take the time to learn gardening – well, it is what it is.
Still, you saw the drought map in the column Friday and since we have all the room in the world – and none of that big city balderdash (building code inspectors) we can actually “Live free and eat” out here in the woods.
We’ll go inside in a sec. but have a look at the outline we’re thinking of for the ultimate outdoor garden space for 2:
The black lines on the lawn are where I’ll be putting in a super-strong deer-proof fence. That said, there is no such thing as “deer-proof” except as a patent novelty, perhaps. This is a great thing to have when you’re older: Always another project, another experiment – in my case, another column, another book – and another turn around on the lawnmower. See, that’s the why behind getting out of bed. Ikigai.
The yellow line (through the solar panels for the 12V greenhouse system which has backup lights and runs the rainwater pump and air bubbler) is where the improved heat-resistant sidewalls will be when I get my schedule dialed back a bit.
This was driving me crazy for a while – because a standard (*cheaper to ship) twin wall panel is almost always 4-feet in length. So when Vevor came out with 5-foot-long twin wall panels, I shoved the widows and orphans out of the way and grabbed 20 of em.
Below about the yellow line will be T1-11 (not to be confused with an L-1011, unless you’re on short final) while above will be the 5-footers to the roofing. (Still arguing whether to twin wall that. Right now it’s thick Lexan and works dandy except for a bit too much heat gain in the summer.) Which then brings me to…what?
How Style Wrecked My Greenhouse
The older I’ve become (meaning now that I’m almost to one gestation period from 78) the more time I’ve spent asking myself non-stop: “Are you bullshitting yourself?”
Here’s why the question came up:
In the first pass, G2 and I laid up the framing with Penofin on it – but the Artiste in Chief said “No…has to go…too Orange…” In 2022 it was still a color, not a politic.
So here’s what I’ve come up with working with the Mind Amplifiers (my AI stack, without Grok which I already told you about)…
Those twelve vertical 2×4s in the greenhouse are not “just framing” once the Texas sun gets on them after 11 AM. At 7.8 feet average height, with two faces taking sun, they add up to about 39 square feet of little brown solar collectors. Left dark or raw, that can dump roughly 2,500–4,500 BTU/hr into the room — call it a small space heater running for free, except you’re paying to cool against it. A coat of white exterior paint should cut that absorbed heat by maybe 50–70%, meaning we may shed 1,500–3,000 BTU/hr of afternoon heat load. Cheap paint, cooler posts, happier plants, and the swamp cooler doesn’t have to work quite so hard.
So that paint will arrive this week – ensuring an absurd number of rainy days will follow.
Next Topic: Electroculture
The tomatoes continue to grow like mad since the Texas Tomato Saw Massacre earlier in the week to push out more fruiting nodes. Over 30 inches tall now… bottom of the grow light is 32:
You can barely see the electro-shocker sitting at 20V (either side of zero) square wave machine. Which gets me to the REAL problems of the week.
My buddy Mike W. sent me a book on Rife frequencies and now I don’t want to do anything but read that. Where I run into one of those “Are you BSing yourself?” moments is when I try to finagle a way to read it while lawn mowing.
We Are What We Eat
Today, I am a New York on the broiler with Benihana-style fried bean sprouts. That was a holding action while the monster Romaine is coming up to table from the music studio/grow room.
Front and center are the next round of sprouting seeds which started soaking a moment after they all posed for this view…
One Problem After Another
This one is a “plant discipline” issue. Yellow squash are being “cane trained” since the closest thing to BDSM Texas offers is it means Beefsteaks Delicious, Squash Maybe…
That about wraps up the ShopWork this week. Still more of it than there is me – shorter columns to come, But remember, UrbanSurvival is now not only a never-ending source of “yucks” but also Yucca’s!
Drop by later in the week, we’re almost ready to harvest the puns. Fresh and tangy, they make more sense than everything east of Gibraltar.
The ham radio build of the Hermes Lite 2 and pairing it with an intermediate amplifier and then an SB-230 will have to wait for the A/C bubble to close in on us. Bubbles are a thing now, it would appear.
Write when you get rich,
George@Ure.net