Posts Tagged ‘straw bale’

Water Tanks Are Like Hard Drives

The tomato plants are on their own.  They started coming in last week and gave us some Sungold cherries and Stupices.  The Romas, Black Krim, Brandywines, Beefsteaks, Purple Cherokees, and Black Cherries are right behind them.  There’s an abomination of an heirloom tomato forming on one of the plants that frightens children and makes the sun dim.  I’m going to bring it to work when it’s ripe.

Water tanks are like hard drives, which are like closets.  No matter how much capacity you have, you will use it up.  We are over-watering the tomatoes out of a.) fear that the 100+ temperatures will dry out our clay soil even though we drip at 4:00 am, and b.) they seem to like it.  Between the trees, tomatoes, basil, and a small patch of summer cover crop (what are we thinking?!) we are using ~1000 gallons a week.  We are going to back the tomato water off next week from 40 minutes a day via 1 gph drippers to 30 and check for ill effects.  My theory is that we have a small lake under the rows and the experiment will therefore be corrupt.  But at least we can use less water.

Dave, our son, came down from Alaska for a week to spend some time in the sun and work on his orange.  We did some interior stucco in the straw bale field shed and cut back a lot of dried grass.  Good fire controls and snake safety.  Plus driving a tiny tractor like a rodeo clown is fun.  The grass got mixed with some of our neighbor’s (horses’) manure for a new compost windrow.  The previous one got spread and seeded with the aforementioned cover crop.

Here’s the thing.  We have Scottish weather in Pacifica by the Sea and our Early Girls are growing like kudzu.  Our tomatoes in the 90-100+ degree heat of Palermo are doing well, but not as well as the Girls.  Perhaps it is the variety.  I can accept that.  But also our backyard compost is so good you could serve it as a side dish.  Our farm soil, not so much.  We are getting there, but we have a whole lot more to improve.  So we are fiddling with some summer cover crop on top of the compost to see if we can get medieval on our paddocks.

With the plants in and the trees another two years from any real production we are down to weeding and construction.  I put up a cell phone extender antenna and now can get a signal inside our Faraday Cage of a straw bale field shed.  We used stucco lath on the inside and outside of the bales to provide sheer strength and something else for the stucco to key into.  It also does a marvelous job of blocking cell signals.  With the zBoost antenna I can now do conference calls and read email from inside the building.  Oh joy!

The Yellow Star Poopyhead Thistle is back with a vengeance, like skeletons in a Harryhausen movie.  Dan picks them out one by one as babies and saves us a larger, hotter battle later.

Dan and I are looking forward to planting a whole bunch more apricots come winter.  We’ll continue to compost the 2400 sf veggie field and grow stuff there, but the message we are getting again this year from the resources on hand are that we should stick to the trees.

Building a hoop house

New Year’s Milestones

Why We’re In a Hurry

Green Construction?

Serious Stucco

Brilliance with Wood

Test Stucco

Staples and Lathe

Endless Construction