No dig diary, 9th March 2024

Posted on March 9, 2024 by james

I’m not sure the Sun rose today, it was so dark all day. And we’ve had a fair bit of rain, too. I braved the rain to move my potted-up strawberries into Frankenstein’s Greenhouse and then retired inside a greenhouse to get some sowing done.

I’m a bit limited by how much I can sow right now because I’m so low on propagator space, so initially stuck with peas, salad onions, nasturtiums (I’ve often wondered if the plural of ‘nasturtium’ shouldn’t be ‘nasturtia’) and radishes. Salad onions I sowed about eight seeds to a module tray cell, radishes about half a dozen. They can all just sit in the greenhouse to germinate. I also sowed sweet peas, Larkspur, Nicotiana and Scabious which can get in the propagator tomorrow after I’ve had a bit of a reshuffle.

There’s more to sow yet and in previous years I’d even have had my first early potatoes in this weekend, but the ground is too cold and wet for them yet.

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Memory Lane, 20th August 2022: A beekeeping toolbox

Posted on March 8, 2024 by james

Some people apparently use shopping bags, but I prefer things to be a little more ordered and hunted around the interwebs for a suitable design. Eventually I came up with something that I thought would do the job, but I was a bit short of suitable wood. I did have some scrap cedar from a hive box that was well beyond repair, so I cut it into strips and glued them together to make a board that was big enough to cut the sides from. The ends are from a single piece of timber whilst the handle is a scrap broom handle or curtain rail or something like that. Probably more likely a curtain rail. I drilled some blind sockets (of course, what else would they be for a curtain rail?) to take the ends of the rail so the handle could be glued in and would support the ends of the box rather than needing to put a screw through from the outside.

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No dig diary, 8th March 2024

Posted on March 8, 2024 by james

Yet more weeding today, but I’m now on the final leg and actually the last (small) bed and a half don’t look too bad at all. Which is a good thing, as in the last few weeks it feels as though someone has moved the ground further away.

I’ve also been potting up strawberry plants from the old tubs. There are six, but today I only managed to get three of them done, giving me sixteen individual plants. There’s a strong possibility that I’m going to run out of pots before I run out of strawberry plants.

As I tipped the remains of one of the tubs into the compost, out popped a queen hornet. Sadly I only realised what I was looking at after a whole load of soil had fallen on top of her so I don’t think she’ll make it.

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Dial gauge mount printed

Posted on March 8, 2024 by james

Well, I’m not too impressed with the print quality, but here it is.

There are a number of issues that need correcting:

  1. The centre section is too big
  2. The hole in the base is too small
  3. The offset cut-out in the wall is too high

I think what I’ll probably do is increase the wall thickness to make up for the centre section being oversize. Then if I enlarge the hole in the base and drop the cut-out down a little I think we should be good.

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First design for dial gauge mount

Posted on March 8, 2024 by james

After a quick bit of messing about in FreeCAD, here it is. I’ll try to get it printed out in the morning and see how it fits.

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Drawering my knife

Posted on March 7, 2024 by james

My wife has never been happy with the trays in the drawers in which we keep our cutlery (and other eating implements) because the preformed trays never have spaces quite the right size or the entire tray is the wrong size for the drawer and so on. I can’t deny that it is a bit messy and often means that things have to be mixed together when you’d prefer they were separate.

So, after a good deal of messing about with CAD (cardboard-aided design) I came up with something I thought would work and planed down some scraps of cedar to a suitable size to make dividers. After longer than I expected, I came up with this.

It’s snug in the drawer so makes as much space as possible available and the compartments are all sized to fit the implements they contain, so I’m quite pleased.

The only thing that really lets this one down is the joints. The idea of chiselling or routing out the rebates for the joins filled me with horror at the time it would take, so I slightly cheated and used the “trench cutting” feature of my chop saw, which stops the blade descending all the way through a workpiece. It took a little time to get the depth correct, but from then on it worked pretty well. What I didn’t really internalise was that the teeth on the blade are not flat-topped, so the bottom of the cut is not flat and there’s an obvious gap in some joints as a result.

The cutlery drawer was relatively easy from a design point of view as most of the compartments contain a single type of item and the sizing is therefore simple. Having done one drawer however there were then requests to do another, which also had a poorly-fitting pre-formed tray (in fact one tray plus half of another). In this case the drawer is used for all sorts of random cooking implements, so getting the right sizes for compartments was somewhat more tricky and it took me some time to work up to a solution. I’m not sure it’s perfect, but I won’t be making another as I’ve run out of cedar 😀 Nonetheless, I’m fairly pleased with how it has worked out.

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Memory Lane, 20th August 2022: Getting the angle right

Posted on March 7, 2024 by james

Prior to setting out on further adventures with the table saw, I decided it would be useful to put something together that would allow be to assemble parts at 90° to each other. I started by gluing together some offcuts of 18mm ply to make small pieces 36mm thick and then cut them into squares using the chopsaw, after which I cut the squares across the diagonal into 90-45-45 triangles. A little work with the bandsaw to cut out some much smaller triangles from the “diagonal side” left me with these.

Right-angle jigs which can be clamped into corners of pieces that need to be joined at 90° whilst screws are put in or glue is allowed to dry. I’ve nibbled off the right angled corner so the jig itself doesn’t get glued into the joint if (or more likely, when) glue squeezes out of the joint.

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I know this much is true

Posted on March 7, 2024 by james

A cheap dial gauge arrived today.

My plan is to 3d print a holder for it that will fit to a block of wood riding on a strip of MDPE that will fit in one of the T-slots of my table saw. I can then check that both the blade and the fence are accurately aligned to the T-slot and indirectly thereby aligned with each other.

It might also be useful for aligning the fences on both the bandsaw and table router, but what are the chances of the T-slots all being “industry standard”? On the whole I’m thinking the odds are pretty slim.

First up is to design the bracket, so it’s time to break out FreeCAD.

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No dig diary, 7th March 2024

Posted on March 7, 2024 by james

The ground is, err, slightly less damp today, so I decided I really had to get on with some weeding before the beds in the veg plot become a tangled mess of bittercress. I did some of the beds a few weeks back in another break in the rain and thought I’d cleared the worst of them, having roughly filled a twenty litre bucket with weeds from each one. How wrong I was.

Obviously there’s been time for more growth since then, but after weeding two more beds today I had filled the same bucket six times! That didn’t count a couple of dandelions and several docks that I put on the compost separately, either. Much of the bittercress was flowering or even had seeds, but thanks to the wet weather the seeds didn’t seem that keen to “ping” off. Or at least I hope not, otherwise in a month or so I’m going to have a whole load more growing.

On the positive side there don’t seem to be anywhere near as many sycamore seedlings as I’ve had in previous years. There may be a number of explanations for that:

  1. It’s been too cold for most of them to germinate yet
  2. Fewer viable seeds were produced last Autumn because of the weather
  3. Many of the seeds got caught in the birdproof mesh over the brassicas, allowing me to remove them and dump them on the compost

I’m really not sure which is the truth right now, but presumably time will tell if the first is true or not.

I had a tidy up in Frankenstein’s Greenhouse where it appears that something, perhaps rats, have burrowed in over the winter. They seem to have gnawed down the stem of one of the pepper plants that was in there, despite stuff I’d have thought was far more appealing as food being on the compost heap. I have no idea why. Then again there was a dead rat on top of one of the compost heaps (that wasn’t there a couple of days ago), so perhaps it found something that wasn’t quite so palatable.

I’ve also gathered together some of my old strawberry plants and a wheelbarrow full of green waste compost in preparation for potting the plants up to go in a greenhouse in a vague attempt to get some early strawberries. At that point I ran out of daylight, so I’ll have to finish that another day.

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Memory Lane, 17th August 2022: A hive barrow

Posted on March 6, 2024 by james

My father-in-law bought a two-wheeled barrow for his wife to use because he thought it would be more stable, but she found it too heavy, so I suggested that he move the (metal) barrow body to a single-wheeled chassis that we had lying about because the plastic barrow body that came with it had broken.

That left me with a two-wheeled chassis and whilst it’s not ideal because much of my property is sloping ground, I decided to turn it into a hive barrow using some more scrap timber.

It wasn’t at all hard: the base is another piece of 18mm ply and the rails (which make it possible to get one’s fingers under whatever is being carried in order to lift it off are just pieces of scrap softwood that I found:

First tests suggest that it’s ok, though not brilliant (because of the balance issues with the two wheels on a slope. Perhaps I could convert it to a single wheel.

It has also been suggested that I might modify the front loop of the chassis to make a tray for my beekeeping toolbox, more of which later.

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