Using Square Foot Gardening

Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape

mudbrrk — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 12:12:54 +0000

The Positivity Blog published an article about Bruce Lee’s Top 7 Fundamentals for Getting Your Life in Shape. They go into some detail on ecah of the following ideals:

What are you really thinking about today?
“As you think, so shall you become.”
Simplify.
“It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.”
“If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.”
Learn about yourself in interactions.
“To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.”
Do not divide.
“Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.”
Avoid a dependency on validation from others.
“I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.”
“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.”
Be proactive.
“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”
Be you.
“Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.”

The Ternary Conditional Operator

mudbrrk — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 03:14:19 +0000

Checking for variables before you use them can be a tedious process, and this step is often missed out in PHP code, leading to masses of PHP Notice errors and possibly leaving the application vulnerable. However, there is a simple solution to this problem, something called the ternary conditional operator. This allows you to check for the existence of a variable (or check that the variable has a valid value) and assign a value accordingly. This is very useful when you are dealing with $_GET, $_POST, $_SESSION etc. variables, because you don’t know whether the incoming variable will exist, and if it doesn’t you might want to assign a default value. Here is the format of the ternary conditional operator:

CONDITION ? VALUE IF TRUE : VALUE IF FALSE

Here is an example to hopefully put this into context:

This one line of code does a surprisingly large amount. Firstly, it uses the isset() function to check if $_GET[’id’] exists. If $_GET[’id’] does exist it simply returns its value. However, if it does not exist the operator returns false. The value that the operator returns is then assigned to the variable $id. So, basically, if $_GET[’id’] exists then $id = $_GET[’id’], however if it does not exist then $id = false
The operator can be useful in a number of applications, and helps you to avoid loads of unnecessary if statements.

Tomato blossom end rot

mudbrrk — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:28:01 +0000

If the blossom end (opposite the stem) of your tomato develops a blackened leathery patch the size of a dime or larger, you have it. Make sure you have some calcium (egg shells, crushed oyster shell, etc.) and
you should not have any problem. A handy tip I read about is: put a crushed eggshell into the hole in the soil before setting in the tomato plant and you should have no problems at all.
For more detailed information go here

Starting to Think About A/C

mudbrrk — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 00:58:27 +0000

DIY Life has a reminder article about getting your air conditioner condenser ready for the new season. Around here, it’s a bit early for that, but it won’t be long before the list below will be on the corkboard todo list

Straighten the evaporator fins. These form the sides of the unit. Are some of the fins bent from bumping them with the mower or Frisbee? Straighten them out using a fin comb. (Yes, such things do exist! I knew you were going to ask.)

Clean the fins. Use a soft brush and soapy water to clean them.

Clean the drain pan. Don’t let it get full of leaves. Finally, pour in a half cup of bleach or use algaecide tablets to stop the funky stuff.

Level the condenser. Use a two or a four foot level. If it’s out of level in any direction, across the top of the unit, shim it up. This will keep the refrigerant flowing the way it was designed.

And finally, start the summer off with a new air return filter. Change it monthly.

Old Habits Die Hard

mudbrrk — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:43:02 +0000

The last time I wrote a blog, I posted funny, unusual or interesting pictures I find while perusing the intarweb. I was hesitant, at first, to include this habit here. However, I read an article about blogging that basically said for you be yourself while writing. As much as this blog is to be about gardening and landscaping my plot of land in the world, all work and no play make for a dull blogger.

With that in mind, I present to you the first in what will be a looooong series of pictures I come across.

Someone, somewhere thinks this is nirvana.

Let the Spending Begin

mudbrrk — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:42:16 +0000

After mulling over various books and websites, I made the plunge and started ordering seeds. My first lot is vegetables mostly, with a few flowers thrown in for good measure. The order was $50, making it the first significant purchase that directly makes the garden grow.

My PlanGarden is coming along nicely. I have made some final decisions as to colors and locations of various elements. There are still a few things to be finalized, but that’ll have to wait until I research my berry plants a bit more and make the final order for them.

I was taking pictures of a thief in my birdfeeders:

When suddenly, he, along with many small birds, scrambled to hide as a new visitor arrived:

After a few minutes, he decided pickings were slim and went off to find better. This is the second time I’ve had a visit from this hawk, or his kin. They make for a stunning few moments of awe and then they move on and the little critters come back out to play again.

Dog vs Yarn

mudbrrk — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 17:52:25 +0000

Our 6-month old puppy was a tiny bit bored and decided to have a go at some newly purchased yarn. His creativity was superb, managing to stretch the yarn from the basket in the living room, around the coffee table, down the hall and up the stairs. Next time things become unusually quiet, I think I’ll go have a peek at the puppy to see what’s going on.

Snow…rain…snow

mudbrrk — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 20:59:55 +0000

This past weekend we received about 3″ of snow. Not much really. Now combine that with rain from last night’s thunderstorm, (yeah…I said thunderstorm…in February, in Southern Ontario ) poorly sloped backyard, frozen ground and warm temperatures and you get water in the basement. The scariest part is that the water was actually coming in at the top of the concrete basement wall. The massive puddle in my back yard covered my brick patio and pooled against the exterior wall and then proceeded to come into the house.

After vacuuming up all the water in the basement, I borrowed a 1/2 HP pump from my wife’s employer and started moving the water from the depression in the yard outside my back door to the drainage ditch conveniently located at the back of my property. There was a good 6″ of water when I started and it took about 30 minutes to get rid of it. Now, I’m simply keeping up with the continuing melt until the freeze tonight. Apparently, we are to get an additional 6″ of snow in the next 24 hours, so I’ll have something to look forward to when the next thaw comes.

This is the second time water has visited my basement from thaw/rain combinations. Strangely, the water came in from a different location the previous time. It’s with mixed emotions that I watch the water flow in this time. Knowing all the problems makes fixing them a one step solution rather than a long drawn out process where you tear up previous work to make further modifications. I truly wish I had seen this problem when I moved here in September, so that I could have made a temporary fix until the spring project fixes it properly.

You never truly appreciate the thought that goes into landscape design and drainage until the drainage part is missing from the design.

Here you can see the level of the water about one hour after the last pumping. Notice how nicely the land slopes up from the house. (click on pics for larger size):

The same area from the other side. There was about an inch of water on the patio:

I don’t know why I don’t just pour the birdseed onto the ground instead of in the feeders:

Online Garden Planning

mudbrrk — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:16:09 +0000

For those out the re who are like me, you have to plan everything to the last detail before undertaking a project, no matter what the size. While searching for a decent software package for landscape design, I happened across a nifty website that uses a nifty flash applet to enable designing a garden in your browser. The website is called PlanGarden.com and my drawing can be seen here.

Unfortunately, if you do a full plan view of your lot you cannot scale the plant images down enough to fit the square foot garden plots, but the ability to drag, drop and resize absolutely everything in the drawing is a redeeming feature that is really handy for fleshing out your design. You can only do one drawing at a time, which sort of makes sense. How many gardens do you have anyway? They have a large selection of plants to choose from, but there is room for expansion. I saw apple, lemon and orange trees, yet no cherry tree, which I do plan on using in my garden design. There are a handful of flowers supplied to give your landscape some color. A nifty trick is to hide the plant label and then insert your own label to match your requirements. Simple, yet effective. There are a few more tools that I haven’t gotten around to yet, but going by the quality of the design applet, I’m sure they’ll be handy and well thought out.

I’ll just finish up the drawing I’m on now, screenshot it and hold on to it for posterity. The next drawing will be a detailed view of the plots and their contents.

There is a desktop version that you can download for PC and Mac, so I’m left out on this one with my Linux box. I would assume it’s the flash applet compiled into an executable package with some kind of connection to the website for updating purposes.

Currently, I’m on the 45 day trial. After that, it’s $20 a year or $36 for 3 years (no 2 year option :?:). I’m not sure yet if I’ll go for the paid access yet. It seems to me that once I have my layout set there isn’t any more to do there. Am i wrong? Then again, it’s only 20 bucks. I’ve paid more for less.

Organic pest killer/preventative

mudbrrk — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 13:22:34 +0000

Here’s a short and sweet recipe to help with pest control for garden and house plants, as borrowed from TipNut. You can use this as a preventative spray as well as a bug and pest killer.

Ingredients:

1 cup Sunlight dish soap
1 TBS vegetable oil

Directions:

Mix ingredients together then store in a plastic, airtight container.
When you’re ready to spray your plants, take 1 to 2 teaspoons of the concentrate and mix with a quart of water. Pour into a spray bottle.
Spray your plants making sure to get underneath the leaves as well as the flower buds and new shoots.
In hot weather, repeat every third day (3 applications over 7 days).
Warm to cool weather, spray once a week for 3 weeks.