A month ago, we had picked up some old wooden boxes for a strawberry garden. My own experience with strawberries generally went like this: I would plant some plants, watch hopefully as some berries grew, then collapsed in despair as the day they ripen an insect had beat me to them. But Liz was hopeful.
And her hopes were not dashed upon the rocks. This last weekend I was tending to my garden and saw these (tasty):
Aside from the Japanese beetles, the bugs have been rather merciful to our produce. In light of these successes, garden expansion plans are in discussion.
This is the Year of the Cucumber. And because of this bonanza, I needed to do something with all the extras. One family can only eat so much cucumber salad, after all.
So I thought I’d try making pickles, as I so predicted I would. Know thyself, I guess. Anyway, off to the Internet! Unfortunately, unlike canning tomatoes, pickle-making has a far less unified following. The USDA, who’s sole mission it seems is to sterilize everything, was not helpful. If you sterilize a vegetable, as in–boil it for 45 minutes–it becomes mush. This is fine for tomatoes, but when I tried a similar approach to pickling peppers a few years back, I ended up with a jar of pepper goo. I therefore sought anecdotal information.
It boiled down (see what I did there?) to two main approaches: a high-temp and short duration treatment, or a lengthy but low-temp treatment. I opted for the first simply because it’d be a quicker process.
The brine consisted of equal parts cider vinegar and water, with salt, then boiled. I cut cucumbers into spears, packed two jars, then poured in the boiling brine, then flash-boiled the jars. I added additional seasoning of dill seed, dill fronds, and crushed red pepper.
Admittedly, I have no idea what I’m doing here, but presumably the brine preserves the cucumbers, which supersedes the need for an extended sterilization process. I suppose I’ll find out.
[Edit: 2 days later I found out. Curiosity won out and I opened a jar. I was very pleased with how they turned out, and the red pepper gives them a nice bite.]
No, this isn’t an existential post. Well, maybe a little. So Liz wanted a tiered strawberry bed. That wasn’t a priority project, but something she had been keeping in mind. Recently, we had a kid-free day, and she suggested a couple options to fill that opportunity: Dayton’s 2nd Street Market, and Mendelsons liquidation outlet. The former didn’t sound very interesting to me as I had envisioned food and hippies peddling art (we went there later anyway, and my prediction wasn’t far off). But Mendelsons sounded just odd enough that I became intrigued. And so, off to Mendelsons we went.
“Liquidation outlet” didn’t do this place justice. It was somewhere between hoarder’s opus and nerd’s paradise, if that means anything. It occupied 3 stories of a downtown Dayton manufacturing compound, and was filled with surplus/deprecated products, ranging from plastic restaurant containers to decommissioned business electronics. One day I’ll have a server rack, and I now know where to acquire one to refurbish.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Liz found some nice wooden boxes on the ground floor, which we would go back to. A sign, however, informed us of electronics being on the 3rd floor (the 2nd was off-limits for an unknown reason). Following these signs, we were led down a hallway to a choice: elevator or stairs.
Context often gives words more meaning than the words themselves–looking at this elevator, the notice that it could hurt me was taken VERY seriously
A service elevator with a dubious last-maintenance date? We took the stairs.
It was on floor 3 that I realized there is so much in this world I just don’t know anything about. There were piles of circuits and various mechanical components. Alarm systems, telecommunication systems, closed-circuit surveillance systems, row upon row of capacitors and resistors. There was a section filled with ball-bearing rotation devices. There were things I was afraid to even touch–what appeared to be high-pressure sodium light bulbs. How is this place allowed to exist? I don’t know, but I’m glad it does.
A room dedicated to the era predating transistors
There were many, many ideas for future projects. But, back to the strawberries. Downstairs, we picked up the two boxes we had set aside earlier. They were labeled as NCR boxes–a company I had to research as I am a non-native to these parts. Once I did, however, I remembered the logo. Sadly, it was another big company that had abandoned Dayton with the recession. The meaning behind those numbers, written upon the wood, will be forever lost to time as the sun physically erases them from existence.
But the wood is solid and looks nice. One placed inside the other, raised on bricks, created the tiered strawberry garden Liz wanted.
Amusingly, it was shortly after writing this post that I received a bourbon barrel from Liz as my anniversary gift. That isn’t as weird as it sounds. The traditional year-5 gift is wood-themed, I like bourbon, the last barrel was a nice rustic decoration, and of course it’s been an effective rain barrel and we’ve discussed wanting another one. And so, she arrived home late one day with this barrel in her back seat, suffering another round of tears to the leather of her car’s interior. Dry, they weigh about a hundred pounds, although they are very oddly shaped to maneuver solo, but as before I managed to muscle the thing out of the car. I also had some time off work, so the following day I began my project, leveraging the prior barrel’s lessons to make the second a little better.
This time around, I had a reciprocating saw, so I didn’t break any drill bits. Also, the wood of this barrel wasn’t as dense, so it was easier to cut. Still, I think I’ll just go buy a large wood bore bit should I ever do this again. That would be way easier and would yield a rounder opening.
For the spigot, however, I didn’t want to deviate from the proven method. Last time, I drilled a 3/8″ hole and gradually whittled it down with a knife until it accommodated a 1/2″ brass spigot. Manually cutting away slivers of oak is exhausting, but I didn’t want to risk drilling too much and ruining the seal. It took an hour, and I was thoroughly baked from the summer heat, and I had a bloody knuckle, but eventually I was able to grind away an appropriate hole and forced the spigot in with vice grips.
I also had the same materials available for the screen, which is still working a year later on the other barrel, so I didn’t feel the need to try anything different. I constructed the same square frame, secured with staples, two layers of nylon screen, and nailed it to the barrel with finishing nails.
This time, I wanted the barrel higher to allow easier access to the spigot. I already had a couple cinder blocks from a previous abandoned project, and the height was good. But the base wasn’t wide enough that the barrel’s frame was being supported by the sides, so I extended it with leftover pressure-treated 2x4s.
I worry, when I make these, that I’ll go through all that trouble only to end up with a barrel that doesn’t hold water. Fortunately, this was not a problem. I filled it to test, and it held just fine. Hooray! I cut the boards and pounded in the spillover–leftover brass piping from the last barrel. Here’s a final shot with it working as intended with the following rain:
Of course I had to trim the downspout, and I laid a brick spillway, but that’s not really interesting or difficult so I won’t go through that.
Now, I can save about $34 a year. Ha! And fear not–I am not a hippie. I still use chemical fertilizers.
…but it is illegal in some states. No, I’m not talking about marijuana (which still isn’t legal here). I’m referring to capturing rainwater. For the most part, this law correlates to the abundance of natural rainwater and by definition–how its variations will effect the local ecology*. Here, no one cares if I capture a 55-gallon barrel of rain because the average annual precipitation for my city is 41.1 inches (according to weatherbase.com), and since 1 inch of rain per acre is 27,154 gallons (according to water.usgs.gov), and since I have 0.48 acres, if I do the math right (27154*0.48*41.1) then I receive an average of 535,694.1 gallons of precipitation per year on my property alone. Excluding precipitation from the winter months, I have roughly 88.1 days with rain. Every time it rains, I inevitably capture a full barrel, so 88.1*55 would be 4,845.5 gallons of captured rainwater per year (assuming I capture a full barrel every time–which I don’t because I don’t always use it up before it rains again, and the spigot is necessarily located where I can’t access all the water anyway), which is 0.9% of the total precipitation for that land mass. Yeah, who cares?
*Except Texas. Last I checked, they still don’t have revised water laws, despite the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer. And of course, there’s the Las Vegas area….
Therein lies the background, but why would I want to bother with this? Firstly, it’s a free resource that saves me money. 4,845.5 gallons = 647.7 cf, at $26.9 per 1000 cf, that’s… $17.42 saved for the year. Okay I suppose that isn’t much for an entire year, but still, it’s free. Secondly, there’s the smug factor. I’m doing my part for the environment. Nevermind that I use twice that per shower…. Thirdly, we had the barrel sitting around as a souvenir from our trip to Kentucky, and it wasn’t serving any purpose, and besides–a project! These reasons were as good as any.
The barrel had sat on the patio for several years at the townhouse, and a lot of water had leached into it in that time. It was a two person effort to move the thing, so before I did anything else with it I needed to drain it. Choosing the widest board–the one with the plug–I drilled a hole near the bottom to both drain it and to place a spigot. The resultant bilge smelled wonderfully of residual Wild Turkey and was perfectly clear with a slight amber color, and having filtered through carbon and infused with ethanol, was probably okay to drink. Still, I erred on the side of caution and refrained.
While it drained I needed to figure out a screen system for the input. So I simply cut a board, assembled a square, fastened it together with a staple gun, then attached nylon screen to both sides.
If it can stop a mosquito, we’re safe
Next, I needed to drill a hole in the top. I admit, this sounded simpler than it was. I did not fully appreciate the strength of American White Oak, hardened by fire and essentially pressure-treated with bourbon. Nor did I posses the appropriate tools for the job. The process claimed four drill bits.
The wood must have been harvested during The Little Ice Age, like the Stradivarius
I wanted the frame removable yet secure, so I opted for 4 wood finishing nails.
It will NOT be a mosquito nursery
Then I had to find a way to attach a spigot. I went to Lowe’s a perused the plumbing. My first thought was to attach a bulkhead, but the wood was rather thick for that. I stood with the parts in had, staring at the barrel, but then I considered that I might be overthinking it. After all, the beauty of the wood was that it was solid yet flexible, and it’s water-tightness was because it swelled when saturated. Perhaps the wood alone would make a seal around the brass. I widened the hole just enough to get the first threads in, then with brute strength and a set of vice grips, forcefully cranked the spigot in. Then to test it, I positioned the barrel upon a couple beams so it was high enough to access the spigot, filled it partially with water, and waited. Initially, it leaked, as was expected. But after several hours, the leak stopped. Satisfied, I cut the downspout to accommodate the barrel.
And the rain rain rain came down down down…Non-potable
A year later and it’s still working just fine. I’ve since drilled an overflow, although in downpours it just spills everywhere anyway. But I’ve also installed the rain garden since so all the excess flows away. I’m thinking we could use another one of these for the front yard. With two, I could save $34.84 a year–enough for a bottle of bourbon.
With overflow, rain garden, brick spillway, and hopeful basil patch to the side
Added to my vegetable garden, it’s one more incremental step towards self-sufficiency.
