Giant Magic Marker O' Death V.2.0

I spent the last two evenings mowing the lawn. I've got a big 6' wide commercial mower that I bought used last year. The spindle bearings were worn when I bought it but I waited until just a month ago to order parts. They came and I rebuilt one of the 3 spindles and found out the other two were a different design and needed different bearings. I ordered bearings again. They came and I put the mower back together last weekend. I had the pulley height wrong on the shafts and broke a drive belt. I ordered that on Monday.

The result is that I was about 3 weeks late cutting the lawn for the first time and it was high, really high. It's a tough mower and I had to run it in 1st gear almost the whole time to keep it from stalling. I can usually mow in about an hour and a half but it took me two evenings this time. I'm probably going to need a bailer for all the grass clippings. (For you city dwellers, a bailer turns hay (cut grass) into hay bales (square or round blocks of hay...it was just a joke)

But the mowing's done so tonight, I got a chance to do a couple of things in the garden again.

I repaired/replaced/redesigned the irrigation for my strawberries. It's warming up and they need water pretty bad. I installed 3 soaker lines. Soaker hose is a loosely formed hose made of shredded tire rubber. Water oozes out all over and waters what ever's near the hose. I wanted 1/4" soaker hose and couldn't find it locally so I had to order that. It came Monday and I finally got around to installing it today. If you look carefully, you can see 3 pieces of hose running through the strawberries.

strawberries w/ soaker hose and freshly cut grass.

The two apple trees and the nectarine tree I planted earlier this spring are starting to get leaves. I'm probably 3 or 4 years from actually having any fruit but at least they're showing signs of having survived the trip across the country in a UPS truck.

new apple tree

We had some more asparagus with dinner this evening. This time my wife tried to hid it in a cheesy, shrimp and pasta dish she makes. Tonight, she substituted asparagus for the broccoli she usually adds. I'll be glad when asparagus season's done.

And finally, I think I have solved the initial problems with the Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death. A friend tipped me off to the weedball. a similar but clearely inferior product. If I wanted to massage the weeds away, I'd use a soothing rolling ball to do the job. But if you want to stab and jab the weeds to death, The Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death is the best tool for the job. But I'm still amazed that they saw my post Monday last week and were able to get a product to market so fast.

Well, my first design used a porous plug to keep the herbicide from running out and it didnt' work. I got thinking. The wick from an oil lamp sits above the oil and oil runs up the wick by capillary action. What if I had a small amount of herbicide at the bottom and a cotton wick stuck into the liquid. The herbicide would be drawn up the wick keeping the wick damp but not dripping. So I built it.

GardenerX invents the (already
invented) capillary siphon

A piece of cotton rag acts as the wick and it works pretty well. However, there is a minor issue that still needs handling. By turning the wick back down again toward the ground, I ended up creating a capillary siphon. I had never heard of it either. As you probably remember from grade school science, if you put a hose in a bucket of water, suck on the hose to fill the hose with water, and then let the free end of the hose drop to a height lower than the bucket; the bucket will empty out through the hose. That's a siphon. In this case, the herbicide is being drawn up the cotton rag and then gravity is helping it down to the bottom where it's still dripping off the bottom of the rag. If it was allowed to drip for long enough, it would empty the small reservoir of herbicide. I filled the reservoir with water and let it sit on my desk for an hour or so. I just kept dripping. drip, drip, drip. I thought, "It almost acts like it's siphoning the water" and typed "capillary siphon" into Google. It turns out it's a real thing and, like all great ideas, someone else figured it out first. It drips really slow so it's completely usable but it could use some tweaking.

Another gardening innovation brought to you by GardenerX, but Stay tuned for Giant_Magic_Marker_O'_Death Version 2.1.