Category: Projects

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Farm to Table

I never wrote a sequel to the great strawberry harvest of 2021:

Strawberries I Guess?

At the time, I didn’t seem to have had much hope of a good crop. As it turned out, however, the yield was very good indeed. And my portioned bags of frozen fruit saw us through many a cold winter Saturday family card night with margaritas and daiquiris.

Ultimately though, I lost the war on weeds that year and started over with new plants, and they haven’t had enough time yet to fill in, so no followup harvest.

But as it turns out, you can cheat, and visit a tourism farm or whatever they call them. That wasn’t on the menu for me as a kid out west, but apparently affluent white people from the midwestern burbs just can’t resist the opportunity to drive out into the countryside and pay a farmer to pick their crops for them. Whoever came up with that business plan is a genius.

Not only do you get the privilege of paying a farmer to do their work, you also get to then buy the product you just picked for them.

It sounds absurd, but if you want to buy some fruit in bulk, it’s ultimately cheaper. Bonus: it builds character too.

Just look at all that character being built.

30 pounds of fruit yielded about 2.5 gallons of jam and butter, plus some reserved for freezing.

Also this was not my project – I just took photos. To chronicle the homesteading and such. Liz doesn’t want to write blogs, so she can’t fight back when I talk about her here and say things like that she labeled the cans wrong. Nya nya!

As for me, I’ll save my canning for tomatoes and broth. (And the tomatoes I’ll be growing myself! I’ll even let the kid pick them for me for free.)

–Simon

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I Don’t Want to be Seen

I don’t want to see some views, but I also don’t want to always be seen.

https://ephemerality.net/i-cant-see-you-more/

In all cases of lattice work, it’s a little of both.

The specific view in question this time involves a vista of the neighbor’s driveway and the road beyond. Traffic on the road is distracting at night, but what really breaks the tranquility is the cars coming up the driveway. The approach, before turning to their garage, directly points to our deck and the sliding glass door to our living room. At night, headlights from approaching vehicles illuminate the whole area. It is, somewhat annoying. Recurring readers of this blog might have noticed I dislike the runaway trend of increasing lightbulb strength.

It would probably be unreasonable to ask the neighbors to turn off their headlights, so, it was back to an old trick: a trellis.

A view of what lays beyond

Using some prior lessons, the work went much faster this time.

I also had some additional manual labor this time

A few 2x4s, 1x2s, 1x8s, 1/2″ bolts, and several hundred deck screws; I had successfully created a polite screening, and prime real-estate for climbing plants.

I’m told if I do this to the entire perimeter, I can get a greyhound.

Also, look at this fancy seamless joint on the corner.

–Simon

P.S. I still managed to refrain from putting tools in trucks.

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Aquarium Evolution

I realized that I haven’t taken a photo of my aquarium since it was restarted, so I will do so now. For reference, here’s what it looked like in 2018:

I have since upgraded the lighting and added a CO2 system, which allows for better plant variety. I also ripped most of these out, because the tank was completely overgrown. This is what it looks like now:

Amano competition here I come!

–Simon

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The Way is Shut

The Dads do not suffer the dogs to pass.

Easement Acres gets its share of odd projects.  And this time it’s for muddy paw mitigation.

Say it’s nice enough to leave the door open.  Say I want to enjoy the deck.  Say I also want to let the dogs enjoy the weather because I’m an awesome dog dad.  But also say that the backyard isn’t dry, and say the dogs like to run and I can’t keep grass growing back there so it’s’ a mud pit.  And finally, say that politely instructing dogs to not leave the deck has little effect.  What to do?

Simple.  Shove a kiddie pool against the stairs and wedge it with the grill.

Or, something slightly less trashy…

A gate!

Not a novel solution I suppose.  Somewhere along the line someone figured out barriers need access points and invented such a device.  But I still had to create one that fit my exact needs, so I still get man points!

Behold, my adjustable retainer! The bolt can be loosened to account for changing tolerances.

And another fine application of an existing invention.

A gravity latch. Oooooo.

The whippet has since thanked me by peeing on the floor.  But what she hasn’t realized yet is that I can also lock her in the yard, thus depriving her of deck furniture cushions in the sun once the weather warms.  We’ll see who has the last laugh then!

Naughty dog projects.

–Simon

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CatsKills

I want to shoot neighborhood cats sooooo bad.

Rewind.

Okay, so I just don’t want cats on my property.  I find this to be a very reasonable request.  Yet, in the internet debate over cats being allowed to roam unrestricted outside, the arguments against this practice focus on the dangers posed to the cats themselves, which is still a self-centered argument, even if it’s on the against side.  It overlooks what should be the prime reason: it’s rude to other people.

Even if letting your cat outside wasn’t inherently dangerous, it’s still pissing and shitting in my vegetable garden and digging things up.  It’s being destructive to my property and hobbies, and potentially passing infectious diseases into the produce I eat.  Under no condition would a rational person consider this okay.

And yet – there they are.

And it turns out that the problem was worse than I thought, revealed to me after my garden camera install.

…And that’s just one day.

But I’ve ranted about roaming cats before.  No need to go through that futile discussion again.  Instead, I decided to find a preventative measure that was more likely than changing a cat owner’s behavior.

Although there are other animals I wish to deter, like this skunk

…and some of the squirrel population (but it was fun to talk to them through the camera).

Instead, I invested in a motion-activated ultrasonic alarm.  I had limited expectations, but I haven’t caught any more cats on camera in the two days since I installed it!  So I bought two more.  It seems feasible that I can at last create a cat-free perimeter.  The 3rd one I’ll run at a higher frequency and see if that does anything to the squirrels.  That’d be a double win after last year’s tomato patch decimation.

And the camera worked for one of its intended purposes.  I love it when a plan comes together.

–Simon