Nearing the End of July
It’s been a very busy month but here are a few quick highlights of the last few weeks.
* New deer fence: We built a 7′ high deer fence around Veg garden#4 and that worked fine. Then we planted scrumptious beans and peas and such outside the fence, allowing it to climb string to the top of the fenceposts. Boom! The deer were there and chowing down.
So our new deer fence came from an idea from Bumblerock Farm, and that is to use a 2″x2″ post stuck in the ground (or in our case a bucket of gravel) and use fishing line at about 3′ and 5′ high around the perimeter.
So far it works great.
* another new deer fence: The deer also like very much the row of sunflowers we have growing on the east side of the creek. So up went another deer fence of fishing line. Again.. so far so good.
* Weather station temperature/humidity probe failed on the weekend with no reception to the base station. 
Several power resets to the receiver did not fix this, nor were the transmitter batteries failing. So we took it down off the observatory and remounted it closer to the receiver and presto! Now working. It is getting to be old… 5 or 6 years now, out in the weather. But so far it continues to run.
* Garlic harvest: We are over 75% in the harvesting of garlic. This year we have timed it better to be able to harvest a little at a time, as it is ready, rather than being late and having to do it all at once.
* Tomatos: Seem to be smaller and less plentiful this year. Perhaps a consequence of fewer pollinators? No tomato hookworm sightings yet!
* Potatos: Mornings and evenings are colorado potato bug picking. It seems there is a never ending supply.. then again they did get a 2 week headstart on us while we were away earlier.
* Radio astronomy: this past weekend we started assembly of our Radio Jove Kit, a leftover from last summer, where time seemed to disappear at a furious rate! We got the northern dipole assemble and erected but lacked sufficient parts for the southern dipole. Hopefully that will be todays project. After that we look to building the receiver.