Garden Notes: July 2023

 Rainfall 

• 1st: 0.48"
• 2nd: 0.25" 
• 4th: 0.47"
• 6th: 0.03"
• 7th: 0.44"
• 8th: 0.01"
• 10th: 0.03"
• 15th: 0.17"
• 19th: 0.17"
• 20th: 0.18"
• 22nd: 0.37"
• 28th: 0.69"
• 31st: 0.39"
• Total: 3.68 inches

Temperature

• range of nighttime lows: 63 to 73°F (17 to 23°C)
• range of daytime highs: 80 to 93°F (26 to 34°C)

Weather Notes

• Firstly, I'll make note of my Thermometer Discrepancies post plus comments. I'm still mulling over exactly what data is useful to me in our lives here: rainfall surely, temperature logical, with humidity and heat index a large factor which only seems important on the day. I'm jotting the heat index down on my calendar, but I'm not sure what else to do with it yet.
• The highs have been on the low side of normal for July, but it's been humid, which means we're just as hot and sticky as when they're on the high side of normal!
• The lows are unusual. Typically, this time of year our lows our in the mid-70s (   ), so we're cooling off at night more that usual. This is welcome! It helps cool the house off. We haven't had to use our Arc-Chill cooling blanket yet, and I often put on a flannel shirt when I head out for early morning chores. 
• Rain forecast is always for "scattered thunderstorms" or "isolated showers," which means sometimes we get it, sometimes folks down the road get it. (Which can be frustrating for a gardener.) I think the frequent cloudy days are what's helped keep our daytime highs lower than usual.

Garden Notes

• Only mornings are cool enough to be in the garden, but our humidity is in the mid-90s%, which means everything is drenched with dew. I have to get everything done by 9 or 9:30, when the sun hits the garden. It's just too hot after that.
• Afternoons are for canning or other activities.
• Morning garden work includes picking, bed prep (like the potato beds, which are all done for the summer), some weeding, and I still have a few places to mulch.
• This time of year, the garden is on the wild side.

Believe it or not, everything here is stuff I want: summer veggies, volunteers,
forage greens, and cool weather crops going to seed, which I'll collect later.

Photos

The final load of potatoes, with one lone onion I found.

Final harvest weight  of potatoes was close to 80 pounds. We've had a lot of discouraging years with them, but this year they did well. I think the difference was preparing the bed with compost, bone meal, and azomite minerals. Last year I reviewed a book by Lynn Gillespie, High Performance Gardening. It's primarily a beginning gardener's book, but I gleaned a nugget of gold in her discussion of soil minerals. I did a little research and discovered that I already had a good solution in the barn, Azomite. It's powdered organic trace minerals, and I started mixing small amounts with my compost. I think that's what made the difference!

The other thing I want to note is that digging potatoes was easy this year. I planted the seed potatoes in shallow soil and then mulched heavily. All potatoes were right under the surface of the soil and easy to find. Very little actual digging required.

Early July harvest sampler: summer squash, slicing tomatoes, cucumbers

Okra and cherry tomatoes followed soon afterward.

It's too hot for lettuce, so our July salads are usually cucumber and tomato based,
maybe with hardboiled duck egg, grated feta goat cheese, and ricotta/salsa dressing.

Or this one: tomato, cucumber, and black olives as a
treat. The dressing is my homemade ricotta ranch.

July canning sampler: pear sauce, zucchini, dill pickles

I'm guessing August will be hotter and dryer. August is when it's recommended to plant my fall veggies, but it's usually too hot and dry for that to make sense. 

How is everyone else doing? Gardens still making it? Not overworking? Anybody else looking forward to fall?

Garden Notes: July 2023  © July 2023

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Dan's Power Scythe

Once upon a time we had a sickle mower.

our old sickle mower

It was a great alternative to the scythe, as it could cover more ground, more quickly. Not that we're always in a tearing hurry to get things done, but sometimes expediency is helpful. Unfortunately, this Troy Bilt was discontinued years ago, and replacement parts are impossible to find. Eventually, it stopped running and Dan couldn't fix it. So that was that. 

Since then, Dan's done all of the hay cutting, wheat harvesting, and tall pasture grass mowing with his scythe. But we've discussed options. Such as a new walk-behind sickle mower (selling for something like $6000), a sickle bar for the tractor (large and also expensive). or better yet, a sickle attachment for our old John Deere garden tractor. It will take attachments, except the small bars are now longer manufactured, and we have searched in vain for a used one. 

What about "inventing" something of our own? We discussed that for years. The best idea we could come up with was to somehow rig a hedge trimmer for sickle work. Here's Dan's first experiment.

Dan's power scythe, the prototype

He attached a hedge trimmer to the snath (handle) of his old American scythe (he prefers to use his European scythe) Here's it's first test run.

As you can see, it worked well. It even cuts through clump grass easily! (Something the scythe doesn't do well). Even so, it needed improvements. For one thing the wooden snath made it even heavier than it already is, and the controls couldn't be accessed except by bending over (not always convenient.)

Here's version 2. 

Lighter aluminum frame

Hand control for the throttle

 

Wiring for the throttle.

Here's version 2's test run.

That went well, so the next test was to put it to work, cutting a small patch of hay. It worked really well. He's able to catch the cut grass on the trimmer's blade guard and then lay it down in nice, neat rows. 

Can you see the rows? (Probably not enough contrast.)

As with most of our tools, we have both a power version and a manual version. We'll take advantage of the benefits of power tools while we can, but we have a backup in case we need it. 

Dan's Power Scythe  © July 2023

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

Thermometer Discrepancies

I have two digital thermometers that measure daily outdoor and indoor temperatures. The oldest is my Acu-Rite.

It was cheap, has no bells and whistles, but records daily maximum and minimum temps, which is what I want for my daily record keeping.

The second is newer, a Logia that Dan and I bought ourselves for Christmas last year. 

Although cheap for it's class, it has a lot of fancy features that are useful. The biggest problem I have with it, is that the time is always an hour off. I've reset it, tried it on daylight savings mode or not, even changed time zone, but when it does it's radio check to update itself, it reverts back to this hour-off flaw. I need to mention that because even though the time on these thermometers appears to be an hour different, these photos were actually take less than a minute apart. Which brings me to what I want to blog about, i.e. they are reporting significantly different outdoor air temperatures.

I've been puzzling over this, and the first thing that comes to mind is sensor location. The Acu-Rite sensor is attached to a post on our back porch. 

It's in the shade, but  there are two factors that influence temperature:

1. The porch is concrete. Concrete absorbs and retains heat. That's why it's always so much hotter in towns and cities with more concrete than plants and trees. 
2. I cook and can on the back porch and use a fan in the window to vent the heat. That hot air is vented to where the sensor is.

The Logia is located on a pole above our carport.

It's elevated to about second-story height and is in the full sun. I expected it to be the one to report higher temps, but that hasn't been the case. Could the modest elevation make such a difference? I don't know.

I've kept track of the maximum and minimum temps of these two, and the discrepancy is consistent. What I found curious, though, is that the Acu-Rite's higher temp is close to the Logia's heat index temp. And that led to a discussion between Dan and myself about what temperature is and which is more accurate: what the thermometer says or what if feels like. Dan felt the Acu-Rite was more correct because of how hot and sticky it's been. That led to talking about objective and subjective assessment: dry heat versus humid heat, wind versus no wind, and all that. When the humidity is low, it feels better. When there's a breeze (another factor) a hot day is more tolerable. So, which one should is more correct? Which one should I use for my daily record keeping?

As an experiment, I changed the location of the Acu-Rite sensor. I hung it behind the solar battery bank box. When I later checked the read-out, the temperature reported ten degrees lower than the old spot. But it's darker and damper there, plus it picks up the cooler crawlspace temp, which is vented by Dan's exhaust fan in the crawlspace door. 

I use the Logia's max/min button to notate the daily highs and lows. I don't record humidity, because the high is always in the early morning before it heats up. But maybe I should start recording a high and low for humidity too. And perhaps I should start jotting down the high for the heat index. Because while I believe objective data to be the most significant, it's the conditions we have to work outdoors in that impact our experience. 

I have to say, that this exercise has made me look at weather reports differently. Now, I wonder where they got their highs and lows from. Where is the thermometer located? On the roof of a concrete building? Atop a pole in a blacktopped parking lot? In the shade over a grassy lawn? They never say, but it makes a big difference. 

In the end, I moved the Acu-Rite to a completely different location. It's now being used to assess pantry and crawl space temps. And I'll start recording noting humidity and heat index in my monthly garden reports. I'm not sure any of that will be useful in the long-run, but it sort of suits my personality.

Does anybody else record things like rainfall and temperatures? What are your thoughts?

Thermometer Discrepancies  © July 2023

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com