Divine Plumbing Guidance
(House • Nature)
Next time, when confronted with weather cold enough to freeze and burst your water pipes, ask yourself this question:
From Chapter 1, The Secret Life of Bob’s Christmas Lights
→ B.Dunn, Jan 10, 2010, 09 20 am
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Big Bada Boom
(House • Nature)
I was hacking up some PHP code this morning in the guts of a web site I’m working on, when out by the workshop there arose such a clatter, I sprang from my chair to see what just went splatter.
Really, it sounded like two or three people just fell off the top of the roof of the house, only no one was back there that I knew of at the time.
It turns out it was only the pecan harvest saying hello.
We’re pretty well covered up in native Texas pecan trees here, including some old giants perhaps 70 feet tall or so. There’s a smaller one, maybe 35 feet, that some previous homeowner allowed to remain growing as he poured a decidedly homemade concrete driveway around it.
That tree provides cover over the patio area in which we spend much of our outdoors time. It also used to provide just the right amount of dappled shade to protect my favorite tropical hibiscus and plumeria plants from sunburn. But, as pecan trees are wont to do, it grew too fast to suit me, and soon had three major branches slapping at the upper back roof of the house – not doing the shingles any favors, and casting too much shade on plants that otherwise would flower more. So I thought a lot about getting in position somehow with my trusty extensible-pole tree-trimmer and cutting back the offending limbs.
But even with the extensible pole, and even somehow balancing atop my longest ladder with said instrument, I don’t believe I could reach the bases of the branches that needed cutting. So I wished without taking action.
Even that amount of wistful wishing must, it turns out, be applied with care.
The first of the offending branches came down a week ago, blocking the back steps early one morning so that my wife could not begin her customary commute.
This second branch was about three times the size of the first one, and smashed to the ground in the flourish of audio effects that prompted my quick exit out back this morning. Count von Count would have noted that the big end of the branch was 3.5 inches in diameter, and its length was about 16 feet. The heavy end hit the edge of the carport hard enough to flip the whole thing, so that the heavy part ended up coming down on about five plumeria plants and also sliced up a succulent known as a pencil plant. The damage was minimal considering what might have happened, as the house roof and carport roof were both intact, and the car was unscathed despite being whipped by branches weighed down with pecans serving as cats ‘o nine tails.
And that was the key: Despite a very serious mid-summer’s drought, we’re going to have a bumper crop of pecans this year. The trees are so full that, as illustrated rather extremely just now, their branches can’t always support the weight. Thus, bada boom.
Native pecans are much smaller than many of the named varieties and, while no two native trees are identical genetically, I would say that in general the native pecans have a much better, more intense flavor than their more pampered orchard brethren. So we always talk hopefully about having a big crop as each fall approaches, conveniently forgetting the big branches that crashed atop favorite relatives in years past – or the bumper crop of rodents that seems to follow bumper pecan crops.
Harvesting, cracking and shelling pecans is hard work. If this year’s crop is as lush as it appears, we’ll obtain some burlap sacks, fill them up with 40 pounds apiece of nuts and take them down to Lablanc’s Pecans and Mini Storage where, for 25 cents per pound, they’ll run the nuts through a gizmo that cracks each one.
Then they give you the bags back, and you still have to go home and “shell” the cracked pecans, but it saves a lot of time and speeds you on your way to the most tremendous of pecan pies.
That is, if the angry relatives of recently extinguished tree branches don’t jump down from the sky and beat your brains out before harvest.
→ B.Dunn, Sep 09, 2009, 09 58 am
Everything, It Seems, Is Broken
(House • Nature)
Everything is broken save the solar dryer I erected between a carport post, a basketball backboard post and a tree. My favorite part about the double-length clothesline now running 6 feet over portions of the concrete car patio out back is the foot-long length of pecan smoking wood wedged between twine and the carport beam, serving as a pretty high technology line tightening device.
The electric dryer, on the other hand, is broken. If you forget and put a load of light-weight clothing into its maw, the corners of at least one and possibly up to four of your very favorite Hawaiian shirts will become ensnared in an opening gravity has developed between the dryer tumbler and the rest of the inside of the dryer, which acts as a housing for the tumbler. 
Result? You have to throw away the brand new pink-background-with-colorful-dots bathing suit your wife bought for your 5-year-old daughter, because it now has a dark brown burnt-looking but possibly stained spot in it the size of a half-dollar, plus small holes in an irregular circular pattern around the stain/burn. You wait for the day your daughter realizes she hasn’t seen that new swimsuit in forever, so that you can tell her those creeps at the dry cleaner’s lost it.
The dishwasher is broken, pretty much, although you believe that if you took apart most of the assembly attached to the bottom, you could find that filter thingy and pull out the bone fragments and other hideous substances that caused the appliance to malfunction last time. Everyone in the family has developed an extremely hardy appetite and taken to demanding a fourth meal between lunch and dinner since the dishwasher performance began slipping. I don’t mind that the dish-washing chores fall to me, because it takes my mind off of the daily possibility that I’ll be laid off, accompanied by the daily mental assessment of whether that would constitute a bad or good stroke of luck.
The smoker is broken. Although it still can and is being used via the modern miracle of aluminum foil, which can be cut, folded double and laid across the hole in the firebox, at least for another week or four.
The white car is broken. I took it for a recent tune-up and to see why the tire inflation light keeps coming on even though I just bought new tires and they seem to be holding air. The mechanic/tire people couldn’t find a thing wrong but obligingly changed the oil and apparently pulled the hose off of one side of the air conditioning unit. Now I have a tire going flat every four days and the current outside air of 104 degrees (not counting the heat index) leaking in through half the car vents, while the other half pump out cold air. If I could get the hot air to leak into the tire, the circle of life would be complete.
Both bathtub drains and both bathroom sink drains are broken. One of the sinks has at least one toothbrush shoved down in there by Not Me, but the other three drains are merely the cumulative result of hair and body secretions oozing downward into aging cast iron pipes since the year 1915 when the house was built.
And that’s just for starters. Everything, it seems, is broken, and I am not currently enough to counterbalance the effects.
→ B.Dunn, Jun 23, 2009, 05 24 am
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Turning the Houselights Up High
(Plumeria • House)
The transition from fall to winter means many things here at the One Acre Ranch, not the least of which is the placing of plumeria seedlings under artificial lighting in what during the rest of the year is a rather substandard portion of our old house referred to as the Jethro Room.
Older plumeria are a breeze to take care of in the winter: You can deny them light, water and all but enough heat to keep them from freezing. you can even store them stacked up on top of one another, because the plants go dormant like so many sticks, until longer, warmer spring days wake them up.
But plumeria seedlings or new cuttings less than a year old should if possible be provided with a bright, warm winter location to prevent dormancy.
As we have yet to build our first greenhouse, the above fact provided quite the challenge, considering we grew somewhere in the neighborhood of 275 plumerias from seeds this year.
So it was that I purchased a heavy-duty indoor plant lighting system, consisting of a switchable 1,000-watt remote ballast, Yield Master II reflector, with glass, the better to hold either a 1,000-watt metal halide bulb (currently installed) or, closer to spring flowering time, a 1,000-watt high-pressure sulfur bulb. Plus several feet of aluminum duct tubing with a fan at the end, which I’ve attached to one end of the reflector so as to provide ventilation around the tremendously hot metal halide bulb. The ballast gets quite hot, too – as hot as a stove top after several hours.
On the minus side, the set-up adds about as much to our electricity bill as two large color TV sets going 16 hours a day. On the plus side, the plumeria plants have been growing much as if they still were spending the day outside in the summer sunshine. On the minus side, they grew so big and bushy so fast that the overcrowding allowed for a pesky little creature called the six-spotted spider mite to gain a foothold on our crop.
On the plus side, I now know how to control spider mites with horticultural oil at about a 1.5% solution. I also know how long it takes to spray the tops and bottoms of all the leaves on about 275 plumeria plants: A long time.
Actually, I ended up culling the plumeria herd of the 50 or so plants that had been growing least rapidly and appeared to be most affected by the spider mites. This was also necessary to give the rest of the plants more growing room.
It seemed a shame to toss out 50 seedlings, originating as they had from mostly somewhat hard-to-find Thai plumeria varieties that showed a lot of promise. So I used them as the foot soldiers in the Great Cold-hardy Plumeria Experiment. They are now in an outside plant nursery area along a south-facing garage wall fairly well protected from the wind. We’ve had a brief freeze and plenty of near-freezing weather already and, surprisingly, only three or four of the outdoor seedlings have given up the ghost. I fully expect all of them to die, however, if even one survives the winter unprotected and then goes on to grow well in the spring, it will mark a breakthrough in a personal quest to develop varieties of this plant that can more easily be enjoyed by people in colder climates.
Meanwhile, I present the above photo (click on it for a bigger version) along with a shout-out to the fine members of the Fort Bend County Narcotics Task Force. Call it pre-emptive information and allow me to explain:
About a week ago, in my role as reporter for the local online news publication FortBendNow, I found that Task Force agents had discovered a hydroponic plant-growing operation complete with a heavy-duty lighting system somewhat similar to my own. Only in this case neighbors apparently had alerted them to the fact that a somewhat well-known rapper called Tow Down was growing big, potent marijuana plants with the system. So the drug agents busted his ass.
Considering I can see the Fort Bend County Jail from the back window of the upstairs plumeria nursery, and neighbors no doubt wonder what’s up with all the light spilling out the windows all the time, I thought it might be prudent to satisfy everyone’s curiosity, especially to satisfy them that the vegetation growing up here is not intoxicating, but rather tropical and floral.
The profit margin may not be as high for plumeria as for pot, but at least I’ll remain free to pick spider mites off the leaves, as opposed to hanging sadly behind the bars with Mr. Down.
→ B.Dunn, Dec 16, 2008, 06 46 pm
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