Archive for July, 2018

7 results.

Garlic Harvest complete – 5 days

Jul30
by catz on July 30, 2018 at 08:54 and modified on July 30, 2018. at 09:01
Posted In: garlic


The Great SCGO Garlic Harvest of 2018 has completed.
Five days/sessions of harvest over a week:
Sun 2018 July 22 – 3 hours
Mon 2018 July 23 – 1.5 hours
Wed 2018 July 25 – 1 hour
Thu 2018 July 26 – 1 hour
Sun 2018 July 29 – 3 hours
Just under 10 hours to harvest around 800 plants.

This includes washing, cleaning, labelling and hanging on five drying racks as seen above. They are inside a leanto structure that is screened but otherwise open to the airflow on the eastern and western ends.

It also includes harvesting the plants from the bulbil project, approx 24ft^2 of another 50+ bulbils being grown into fullsize garlic over the course of a few years.

Less than 5%, probably closer to 1-2% of the garlic did not make it. Will no more once we transcribe the records from outside. leak moth damage to bulbs looks pretty good so far as well, but again we will know more later. After drying/curing for 2-4 weeks, the will come come down out of the racks, stalks will be cut off, roots trimmer and then the batch will be measured and weighed. Then seed is selected and put into a paper bag and then the remainder of the garlic type and the seed bag go into another labelled bag and stored in the coldroom.
Planting will be in late October/early November this year and we are starting to look around to see where we have 400-500ft^2 elsewhere for crop rotation.

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It’s a Beautiful Day!

Jul26
by catz on July 26, 2018 at 09:34 and modified on July 26, 2018. at 09:35
Posted In: life the universe and everything

A month of drought, heat waves, cracked soil, dead grass, dead plants and finally we have 4 days of slow rain.

69mm to be exact. And it is awesome! Plants doing better, nights are cooler, windows are open and the house is cooling down. The garlic harvest is on hold however… new estimate is late Sunday to complete (4 days from now).

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Garlic Harvest Day 3

Jul24
by catz on July 24, 2018 at 13:24 and modified on July 24, 2018. at 13:35
Posted In: gardening, garlic


Day three of the SCGO 2018 Garlic Harvest. Another 90 minutes in the gardens, another 136 plants harvested. For the first time, the new washing table was put to use.
Easier on the back with less bending over, but still the water splash completely soaks your front.
Still, better than before.

Construction details:
The tabletop was built from 1×4″ wood, 21″deep and 48″ wide. It was glued and screwed together. Hardware metal mesh with 1/2″ grids were installed on top with a little extra (24″x50″) bent over the edges. with the corners cut to allow the bending. It was stapled and nailed (1″ roofing nails) on.
After that, a suitable work height was determined to be 36″, so 2×4″ legs were cut to 36″ and mounted on the inside of the tabletop. Glued and screwed in gives a relatively stable surface to work on.
A cloth was added as a skirt to stop the spray from soaking ones legs and a 2×2 post was added on one edge to help support the hose.
All of the material except the hardware mesh were leftover items and were reused for this project.

Testing revealed the hose still needed to be handheld as it was not directed at the correct area for washing. Still working on that feature upgrade.

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Tomato progress

Jul23
by catz on July 23, 2018 at 08:35
Posted In: gardening, Heirloom & Heritage Tomatos


This is part of our heirloom tomato patch. Each plant is staked, velcroed for support and labelled with a laminated nametag. We top up our soil each year and this year’s was just a little weed infested. The foreground is the result of an hours worth of weeding, the background is the total ground cover of weed. Ick! So far so good, no tomato hornworms at all. The drought has been bad. The 2nd image shows the last month of rainfall at our weather station. 10mm for July and maybe 25 for the last 30 days, with two to three weeks of heat wave temperatures. Surprisingly the tomatos are doing not too bad. They are being watered every other day in the early morning or late evening. The ground is totally dry the next day. There are some flowers coming up, some pollinators in the area, so we hope for a slightly subpar normal harvest this year.

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garlic harvest 2018

Jul23
by catz on July 23, 2018 at 08:27
Posted In: garlic, life the universe and everything

Sunday 2018 July 22nd, the 2nd day of garlic harvest. Saturday was about 3 hours of harvesting just under 200 plants. Sunday was only about 1 hour for just under 100 plants.
They were hand brushed off to get the very hard dirt out of the root and bulb surface, then rinsed in water and finally tagged with a cargo tag with their type and number and hung up to dry in a shaded open air leanto for 2-4 weeks.
We plant a minimum of 6 cloves of each type with 12, 18 or even 60 of types we like. Their were over 80 types this year and we hope to be finished the harvest in another 6 days or so. A new feature, as yet untested is a washing station table, basically a 2’x4′ box with hardware metal mesh over the surface on a stand 36″ off the ground. We will try this out the next harvest session.

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Bright meteor 20180629 01:24:58 EDT

Jul05
by catz on July 5, 2018 at 08:05
Posted In: astronomy

Reviewing the nightly allsky2 images of bright meteors, we came across this *nice* meteor at 05:24 UTC or 01:24 EDT.

Needless to say, we were not awake to see this but perhaps some of you were.

This was about a 3 second event from overhead (north is up) moving east to west

The two bright objects near the eastern end may be Jupiter on the bottom and Arcturus on the top.

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power rankings

Jul04
by catz on July 4, 2018 at 08:48
Posted In: life the universe and everything

Interesting analysis summary. Unsure of the detailed parameters but it looks pretty in the end.

The only good news is: being at the bottom means you can only go up 🙂
Wow.
How many weeks on the bottom before we get a better coach?
How many weeks on the bottom before we try to get some of our better players back.. oh wait.. many have now retired out of frustration.

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