Posts Tagged hardware store
First Seedlings of the Year
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Food on February 4th, 2010
The first seedlings, onions and leeks, have been started, and a few are even poking their heads up to get some light.
It’s really early in the year to be starting seedlings, but onions are a slow starter,and as near as I can tell, late January is actually the right time to have them ready to go into the ground by April.
Especially with the trouble we were having with the wood stove, the house has been very cold. 50 degrees in the morning, and seldom higher than 60 throughout the day. Putting on thermal underwear first thing in the morning has become routine, although hopefully that’ll resolve itself now that the stove seems to have been fixed. (New gaskets. Where, by, “new,” I mean, putting in gaskets that somehow were not present at all.)
They say that the soil needs to be above about 60 degrees for the seedlings to germinate. This is a bit of a mis-statement. Many plants will germinate at lower temperatures, even down to freezing. They just take a good long time to do it, and the whole point of starting seedlings indoors is to use the warm, protected environment to get a jump-start on the year’s crop.
Additionally, I have found that, with starting seedlings in a windowsill there’s just not enough light and they get very spindly. This house is especially well shaded. Although it has a south-facing front, it also has a porch, and the sun is usually shaded from the windows.
So I decided to get some grow lights and a heat mat for my seedlings.
You can spend a lot of money on grow lights, and perhaps the high-priced lights are better, but for my purposes, I’ve decided to see what kind of results I get with fluorescent shop lights. You can buy them at your local hardware store for about $20 each, and a pack of ten bulbs is about $20. All told, I spent $50 for two lights, which I estimate will be enough to light all of my seedlings.
In the photo above, the lamps are resting on the greenhouse boxes. I plan to build a stand out of PVC. It’s nice to have a stand so that you can adjust the height of the lamps. As the plants get taller, you raise the lamps so they’re consistently just a few inches above the plants, maximizing the light the plants get.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.”
Heat mats, you can buy online all day long, but finding them in stores is harder. Even Mayo, the local lawn and garden center didn’t have any in stock. Luckily, Ferry-Morse makes a heated greenhouse kit that comes with 72 peat starter-pellets, a mini-”greenhouse,” and a heat mat, and Home Depot carries all variety of Ferry-Morse products. The kit is about $24, which, if you were going to buy the greenhouse at $7 anyway, is a fair price for the mat.
One of the problems you can run into with a heat mat is overheating the plants. The heat mat will keep the plants about 10-20 degrees warmer than ambient temperature (mine is doing about 22 degrees, so it’s a bit of an overachiever). For my house, that’s no problem, as they hover around 80 in the kitchen. For a typical American house, it would put the temperature in the 90’s, which may be too hot for some seeds. You can buy a digital temperature controller for about $30, but I suggest simply putting the heat mats on a $10 timer.
The lights are on a timer so that the seedlings get 16 hours of light and 8 hours of dark. Some people say that you can give them 24 hours of light, but I figure they might get a little confused when they get set outside. The timer was about $10 and has integrated switches to allow you to set “on” and “off” in 15 minute increments. I like this better than the ones where they give you four plastic tabs that you have to set for “on” and “off.” The nice thing about this timer is that, if I wanted to, I could put the heat mats on the timer and do 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off, all day long. If the timer had removable plastic tabs, I would only be able to turn on and off four times a day.
In order to monitor the soil temperature, I have stuck a kitchen thermometer into a peat pellet that hasn’t been planted with anything. I set it so that 80 degrees is straight up and then I can quickly check the temperature through the moist plastic of the greenhouse.
Why I cycle on the road
Posted by Joshua Bardwell in Uncategorized on June 25th, 2009
I ride a bicycle sometimes: to the grocery store or the hardware store—that kind of thing. I started doing it after Burning Man, 2006, which had an ecological theme. I figured every mile I ride is another mile of petrolium I’m not burning; another mile of carbon and other pollutants I’m not putting into the air; another mile I’m not putting on my car, which will eventually be replaced, at great use of natural resources. I feel good about riding because I think I’m making a good choice for myself, for my community, and for my environment. I also like the idea that I’m getting from point A to point B using nothing but my own strength and a few simple machines.
When I ride, I usually ride on the road, which sometimes pisses off drivers who are behind me. If there’s a sidewalk, they sometimes yell, “Get on the sidewalk!” If there’s not a sidewalk, they cut to the chase with, “Get off the road!”
In Georgia, bicycles being ridden are treated legally as vehicles, just like cars. They are granted equal access to roadways and are subject to all traffic laws. Georgia state law does not require or even recommend that bicycles use sidewalks. As the Critical Mass people put it: bikes aren’t blocking traffic, they are traffic.
Drivers have argued that a slow-moving (10-20 mph) vehicle doesn’t belong on the roadway with much heavier, faster-moving vehicles like cars. Never mind that the law doesn’t agree with them. One reason I ride on the road instead o fthe sidewalk is that bicycles going 10-20 mph don’t belong on the sidewalk with pedestrians going 1-3 mph. Bicycles on the sidewalk can pose a safety hazard to pedestrians. When I ride on the street, I put myself in danger if a car hits me. When I ride on the sidewalk, I put someone else in danger if I hit them. I choose the former.
The sidewalk is not built for fast-moving vehicles. Riding a bike on a sidewalk is like driving a car down a rocky, unimproved road. There are constant bumps and jounces which are uncomfortable. Additionally, the sidewalk often curves sharply at intersections, and these curves can be difficult to negotiate at speed because they’re designed for walkers going 1-3 mph, not bicycles going 10-20 mph.
But the most compelling reason for riding in the street is that drivers don’t expect to see a vehicle going 10-20 mph on the sidewalk. Drivers are less likely to check the sidewalk when they pull out into traffic. They tend to visually check the oncoming lane, and then move on. This means that a cyclist on the sidewalk is more likely to have an accident with a driver who doesn’t see him or her and pulls out in front of him or her.
So, to sum up: No, I will not ride on the sidewalk. I understand that it’s frustrating for you to have to slow down until you can pass me. We are both entitled to use the road. If the road is not wide enough to simultaneously support all of its legal users, perhaps you can write a letter to your city council-person and see about having it widened. I’m already doing something difficult and a little scary by riding a bike on the street with you, but I like it and believe in it. Your yelling at me is not making it better for either of us.
I’ll close with a funny little anecdote.
When drivers yell, “Get on the sidewalk,” to me, I wish I could say all those things to them. I half hope I will catch up to them at a red light and be able to talk to them. It’s just so one-sided when they yell at me from their car window and just keep going. I got my chance when a man in a pickup truck made a left turn behind me. He was going slow enough that I was able to immediately hop off my bike and wave to him, meaning to say, “Come here and let me talk to you.”
Unfortunately, “Come here and let me talk to you” is apparently easily mistaken for, “You want to go?! Come on!” Especially when you’re already pissed by the fact that someone is riding a bike on your precious road. The guy leaned out his window and shouted, “I’ll kick your scrawny ass. Come on down to the end of the street and let’s go!” I figured “let me talk to you” probably wasn’t going to get me anywhere and rode on.
What is it about riding a bike on the street that makes a person so instantly violent?
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