Garden Update July 2011

This year has been an incredibly dry one.  Right now, the monsoon rains have begun and things are not as bad as they were during the spring and early summer (recall the AZ fires not too far away).  When I arrived at the cabin a few weeks ago, I was pretty depressed to see how dry things were. The upside is that there are no weeds - none - zip.  The downside is that trees in the orchard were suffering mightily.  Only the lavender (see @ left) was doing well.  I have an automatic irrigation system set up, but when your well runs dry, it doesn't do much for you.  Yes, indeed, the well has gone dry.  Not a surprise really.  The well is about 40 years old and one of last shallow ones left in the valley (currently the pump is @ 35 feet).  My neighbors are super nice and are letting me run a hose to their pump to keep my trees alive until I get a new well drilled.  As it is, I lost seven trees - a tough blow.  Being a biologist I can rationalize the loss in terms of natural selection - only the truly desert adapted will survive.  Thank goodness I planted so many varieties.

Dead pear tree.

I estimate the garden and orchard were without water for 3 weeks of 100 degree weather (and yes, that's quite normal for the Gila, not a heat wave).  It's interesting to see how some of the trees are perfectly happy and some died a tragic death.  The truly sad thing is seeing the shriveled fruits on the branches.  Sigh.

Happy pear tree.

The vegetable garden is a total bust.  No beans and chile this year!  As every gardener knows, each year brings different hardships and I'll have to start over once again.  On the bright side, when I left, the indigo seedlings were doing ok.  If the rains have been steady I might have some indigo plants to harvest.  We'll see...

A new life for old wood

The sunroom, see previous posts, was originally designed to be a greenhouse attached to the cabin. Three walls are mud-plastered adobe; the south "wall" is mostly window.  This frame wall is now covered with Tyvek and ready for stucco  and I was going to cover that with stucco.  I decided the stucco would never look right next to the adobe and brick, so I then I thought I would do mud plaster there too.  Then I saw a reclaimed wood wall online (not this one, but similar) and the lightbulb went off.  Thinking about the stuff around the yard at the cabin, I thought I could scrape up some wood, but most of it turned out to be 2x and 3x material, too thick (I'll use it for bookshelves).

No, my mom is not a hobbit.

I scrounged at my Dad's, but he had surprisingly little.  My last stop was my Mom's place.  She also had very little around the house, which was a surprise because she hoards everything.  While parking, I noticed some old pallets by the old horse pens. We waded through the enormous weeds to take a look....

The old goat pens.

My mom said I could have the pallets, but when I went to take a closer look, they were actually half buried in goat manure - not acceptable. Further investigation however, revealed a treasure trove of boards along the goat pens totally hidden by the weeds.  The boards were 1x10s, either four or eight feet long - perfect.  Each is an elegant silvery color and all are in very good shape.

A small sample of the harvested boards.

There is a lot of wood here, so even if I bang-up or rip some of the boards, there are plenty to spare.  The big adventure will be tramping through the weeds, fighting the spiders, and prying each board off the fenceposts.  The rewards will be great.  There's enough wood here to completely cover the sunroom walls, make some shelves in the kitchen and have lots left over for future projects.  Stay tuned

Big praise for small stones, Part 1

As I've mentioned in previous posts, I gravitate to (but don't necessarily enjoy) projects that require 1) a lot of time and 2) little bits of things to be rearranged into something else.  I'm also cheap (these days by necessity), so if I can make something out of little bits of nothing, I'm pretty happy.  The adobe walls of the cabin are set on a concrete block stem wall which sticks out on the exterior and is indented on the interior. How to cover the unattractive concrete and spend little money?  The original idea... rocks, stones & pebbles.

Scrounging around my mom's house looking for furniture, I found a box of small saltillo tiles.  These are low fired unglazed tiles that have colors very similar to the brick floor and burnt adobe walls - perfect!  I cut the tiles into triangles, sealed them thoroughly and set them with thinset.  I made sure to leave a large space under the tiles to allow for expansion of the bricks during the winter when the solar gain through the windows will heat the room, and the rest of the cabin. 

The rest of the area was filled with small stones and pebbles from around the yard, again set with thinset.  It's a puzzle finding stones to fit the spaces, but the overall look is quite nice - very natural.  Of course, the hard part will be the grouting...  Stay tuned for Part 2.

Dividends in the form of caps

After collecting over 17,000 caps from friends and strangers around the country, I have quite a nice bottlecap collection - an unforseen dividend from the mural project.  I wanted to display the collection, but cruising the internet only provided unattractive (coffee tables) or permanent  (glue and epoxy) options.  I wanted something attractive, with the ability to move my caps around.  I came up with the following design - easy to do and not too expensive.  I had all the materials in the shed; the only purchase was the magnets (about $30 for 400).

The caps are placed on magnets set on top of wooden disks.  The extra height provides some dimension to the display and gives good finger grip when moving caps.  The 389 disks were cut from wooden dowels.


The back of the display is a piece of 1/2" plywood.  I measured out 1 1/4" squares in an offset grid so that the magnets (and caps) would be evenly spaced.  After making the grid, I glued 1/2" square trim around the edges, nothing fancy, but it gives a nice border to the display board.



Glueing the disks was pretty straightforward.  I used wood glue since each disk wasn't going to hold a lot of weight. I wasn't too worried about centering perfectly because the caps could be moved around on the magnets - tweaking would be easy to do by hand.






Glueing the magnets was a bit trickier.  When designing the board, I forgot one of the most important aspects of magnets, their magnetic properties towards one another.  Adjacent magnets would repel one another and slip off the disks before the glue (E-6000) set.  So, the magnets had to be glued every other row - it took about 3 days to finish this step.



Here I am placing caps on the finished display board.  Quite nice, if I say so myself.  The finished board has room for about 25 more caps, but since everything is painted black (see the top photo), you don't really notice the empty spots.  I can move caps around to my hearts content and everything is at eye level.  If the caps get dirty, I can pop them off and wash them.  The only downside to the board is that it is quite a bit heavier than one would expect.  I wouldn't suggest using thinner plywood, however (it warps easily).