Vince’s Vampire Weekend
Hi again, friends. We’re back with a new episode of The Grid Is For Squares. Hope you’re staying strong in the face of all the darkness out there. ❤️
Over the 4th of July, Vince headed north to work on the property. It was 100 degrees in Mariposa that weekend, so I was happy to stay at home with the dog while Vince kicked ass under a bright full moon.
He discovered that most of our plants died because of the heat, including most of the food we planted. But somehow the poison oak came back! Oh goody. Worst. Plant. Ever. But we’ll keep fighting it. We just need to find the right time to pull it and the right thing to plant in its place. It’ll be an ongoing battle and that’s ok.
And speaking of the heat, it got up to 142 degrees in the greenhouse! Not great. It feels like we’re always a season behind… we needed this greenhouse in the winter, but now that we have it, it’s way too hot. But seasons cycle around, it’s what they do. And we have plans for how to mitigate the temperature once everything is in its finished state.
The greenhouse thermometer. Current temp: 115. That day’s high: 142. 🌡️
Vince also did a bunch of brush clearing with the weed whacker, and on the last morning he surveyed our future yurt site. I am doubling down on this yurt project, people. I want a yurt by April. But Step 1 is designing the thing, so now that Vince surveyed the site and took pictures, I can really begin the process. Yay.
WHAT WE BUILT:
A capillary-action watering system for Judy’s Ming Aralia using a jug of water and a string. At least one plant didn’t die!
The finished greenhouse is in sight! The floor will eventually be (in order): hardware cloth, sand, zigzagged tubing for heating/cooling (Pex is the standard, but we’re using medical tubing as an experiment because we have a ton of it already), more sand, and finally bamboo mats. We’ll also have drainage pipes and aluminum boxes covered in mesh at floor-level for ventilation. Homemade bricks will line the outside of the greenhouse to hold the exterior hardware cloth in place.
Vince tripled our bricks, from 5 to 15! We’re using all local aggregate, formed as we bust up boulders in the dugout. It’s important that we perfect our concrete mix now, because although these bricks only need to hold hardware cloth in place, we will need load-bearing bricks in the future.
Our bricks are 16”x8”x2”… more “paver” size than traditional brick size.
Vince’s concrete mix was: 60 pounds of aggregate (a mix of sand and gravel), 30 pounds of cement, and 15 lbs of water. He made his molds from chalkboard material and 2x4s, corners sealed with silicone. We also really need to get a concrete-mixing drill bit so Vince doesn’t have to mix concrete by hand anymore.
There’s still a lot of work to do. Like, so much work to do. But every time we go up, we get a little closer. Baby steps!
