I think someone should check on the guy who named this body of water and make sure he's OK. I'm worried he might not be in the healthiest relationship. He's clearly got something on his mind...
A tip for #Android users with rooted phones: get Titanium Backup and use it to back up any app before you update it. Then, when a new version of an app sucks, you can roll back to your backup version. I've lost count of how many times this has saved me when an app developer breaks something or adds an "improvement" that is no good. I've even used it to help my IT customers a few times when they needed an older, working version of an app because the current version in the Android marketplace was broken (*cough*MicrosoftOutlook*cough*).
I think it only works on phones with root access, though, so it's not for everyone.
The jaws on the model I have will open up to about 3", and I've pulled trees over 2" with it, but it can be a struggle if the tree has lots of side roots. I think it's pretty dependent on your soil and what type of tree you're pulling. Our soil here is a loamy clay, and I can only pull the bigger stuff during the wet spring season. Once the ground dries up in summer, it locks those roots in solid. You can get a lot of leverage with this tool, but if the ground is too hard, you'll just break off the tree at the stump. It helps sometimes to cut around the tree and slice through some of the upper roots with a spade. I use a "Root Slayer" shovel, which is another tool I wish I had discovered ten years earlier. It's an indispensable tool for any transplanting work.
Don't leave us hanging... How did the pumpkin turn out?
If you find yourself needing to remove saplings and small trees, you need a Pullerbear. This thing is a beast. Look at the ridiculous taproot on that hackberry stump. Yoinked it right out of the ground like pulling a weed in the garden.
My only complaint is the feet are too small for soft ground, and it tends to sink in when you lever it over. But a medium sized steel plate placed under it solves that problem. I've had it for a couple years and it's sturdy enough that I expect to have it for the rest of my life.
They'll even weld your name on the handle to make it tough for your neighbor to steal after they see you yanking trees out with it...
#grownostr #tools
(I have no connection to this product other than as a satisfied customer who wishes he had discovered it a decade earlier.)
You probably didn't even realize it when you woke up this morning, but you needed to see a teeny-tiny little lizard drinking a drop of rain today.
#grownostr
First one is one of the barrel stoves right after I finished it. The first fire in it took care of that pretty green paint and it's got a nice rusty patina now.
Second pic is the stove in the house. It's got a soapstone liner inside, so it takes a while to heat up, but stays warm forever once it does. I would have liked a larger stove, but that spot is pretty much the only place in the kitchen that we had room for it (and it's exactly in the center of the house that way) and there's only so much room to work with there. We're in Texas, so the heating requirements usually aren't too heavy, anyway. Will probably install a second one in the living room someday.
I just posted about using HA for monitoring on my place a little while ago. I'm planning on posting more on the topic, hoping to introduce the technology to people who might otherwise think this level of sophisticated monitoring and control is beyond their skills. It's not quite plug-and-play, but it can be much easier than most people probably think it is.
In my prior post on my #homestead #automation efforts, I mentioned moving to Home Assistant from my somewhat primitive home brew system. There are a couple of big advantages to using HA. I expanded the wifi coverage at the farm to include the greenhouses, so I could use cheap Esp8266 boards that have wifi built in, instead of the more expensive LoRa modules in my first setup. It's easier to configure and program than programming Arduino from scratch, once you learn the syntax and structure of its configuration language.
Pictured below is one of the temperature sensors for this setup. A knockoff clone "Wemos D1 mini" and a DS18B20 temp sensor. There's a resistor soldered into the cable (it's the the shrink-wrapped lumpy part of the cable), and that's all. Three cheap components plus the power supply (these run off standard micro USB power, so cheap adapters are plentiful) is all there is. I use these to monitor the greenhouses, freezers, fridge, etc. I think they probably cost about six bucks each to make, and they're tiny enough to fit anywhere.
I have one built into a solar light like in my previous post, with a couple capacitors to buffer the battery power. Wifi takes much more energy than LoRa, so that one sleeps most of the time and only updates the temperature reading once every ten minutes.
A couple of screenshots from the HomeAssistant app on my phone to round out this post, and I'll post more details on the whole system later.
We do the same. Two years ago, we planted what was supposed to be a dwarf variety, but they ended up growing enormous and engulfing the eggplants and peppers they were supposed to be companions for. The marigold plants at the end of the season were almost three feet in height and diameter! I suspect a mixup at the seed packaging facility...
I installed a wood stove in the house two winters ago and use homemade barrel stoves to heat my greenhouses, so all I see everywhere I look now is firewood. I mean, I think that's a photo of some old logs, but for all I know it could be a picture of a duck and my unhealthy obsession with firewood has me hallucinating... 😉
I thought I'd post a few notes about the automation experiments and data collection I've been working on around the farm for the past year or so.
This was my first attempt at a greenhouse temperature monitoring system. I used some cheap Arduino-compatible devices with built in LoRa radios. LoRa is a low-power, low-bandwidth radio system for sending small data packets over longer distances.
Rather than piece together a power solution and enclosure, I installed the boards into solar night lights and used the light's battery and solar panel to run the circuit. By using low-power sleep mode between updates, they'll run about four days on a full battery if there's no sun to charge them. With even just a couple sunny days a week, they run indefinitely.
I attached a DS18B20 temperature sensor to the board, and they send the temperature every 15 seconds to the base station, which is another LoRa-equipped device (inside a 3D-printed case), that also has a tiny LED screen and wifi. The screen displays the temperature and it connects to wifi and makes the temperature readings available to my server, which can alert me if the temperature in the greenhouses gets too high or low.
It all works great, but I've recently been moving to integrating everything into HomeAssistant to avoid having to program everything from scratch, and giving me more options for alerts and controlling things like fans and valves (and even cool features like voice control). I'll post more on that system later.
I'm still using this original system as a backup while I work on my HomeAssistant setup, and it works much better than I ever thought it would. I built it two years ago, and it's been problem-free once I got the initial bugs worked out of my code.
#grownostr #automation #homesteading
Yes, putting a bolt or pin through would lock it just as well (more securely, actually - every once in a while one of the arms will bump something or get caught on a rough bit of ground and pop out of the catch). A bolt was going to be my first design, actually, but then I thought of doing it this way. The primary advantage of this is I don't have to bend down to put a pin in. I can just step on the arm, which lifts the tractor, and push the catch plate over just a bit to latch it under the lag bolt. Move the tractor, and use your foot the same way to unlatch it and set it back down. That's why there's an extra chunk of wood attached to the front of the arm, to give more area to step on.
In case the geometry isn't clear, here's an overall shot of the wheel assembly. It pivots on the bolt at the back, so when the front is pushed down and locked, the wheel contacts the ground and the frame of the coop lifts up about an inch or so. The wheel is attached to the pivoting arm with a carriage bolt.
Here are the photos of the wheel locking mechanism on my chicken tractor, as promised. To make the locking plates, I just drilled a large hole in a scrap piece of 1/8" thick steel, then cut it in half right through the center of the hole to end up with two pieces each with a semicircle cutout that locks into the shank of the lag bolt perfectly. You could also notch it out with a grinder or dremel tool. The plate is just screwed to the back of the 2x4 wheel arm.
The best part about being made of velcro is the ease with which one can instantly camouflage oneself into near-total invisibility.
#grownostr #dogstr
There's a lag screw that sticks out of the bottom bar of the tractor frame, and a small metal plate attached to the 2x4 wheel arm. The metal plate has a notch cut into it so that it locks under the bolt. Hard to explain, but I'll take a photo of the mechanism tomorrow and post it.
I put a couple of wheels on my #chicken tractor that work pretty good. Step down on the 2x4 and latch the wheels down, lift and pull the front end. Unlatch and the tractor sits flat on the ground again with no mouse- or snake-accessible gap. Works great, but I would recommend larger wheels than I used. A small bike wheel or hi-wheel lawnmower rear wheel would probably roll over obstacles better.
The wheels are in the up, disengaged position in the first photo, and down for rolling in the second.
Definitely not a pepper. Pepper plants don't have red stems.
Looks like something in the beet/chard family to me.