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.

Rhubarb Flowers and the Giant Magic Marker of Death

Today was "spray day". This early in the spring, I've only planted a few rows in the garden. The rest of the garden has been sitting for three weeks and weeds are starting to pop up. That's a good thing. It gives me a chance to eliminate some of the weed seeds before they are competition with my plants.

I sprayed the entire un-planted part of the garden with Roundup this evening. Roundup is a non-selective (kills everything) herbicide. It's absorbed by the green parts of a plant and blocks one chemical involved in photosynthesis. The plant can't make sugar and starves to death in a few days. I also sprayed a circle around my fruit trees, between all my blackberries, blueberries, and grapes, and wherever I could spray in the asparagus and rhubarb without killing anything I want to keep.

Roundup in the garden

I hate to hand weed or hoe so I spray anything I can. In fact, most people mow the lawn and then trim the strips around stuff where the mower wouldn't go. Not me. Whatever I can't get with my riding mower gets sprayed with roundup. A 6" dead strip around the house, shop, shrubs, trees, and anything else that doesn't move saves me lots of time keeping the yard cut.

The rhubarb is really taking off. It's flowering now. It was a new planting last spring, I've never grown it before, and I just don't know much about rhubarb. I didn't realize it had such big flowers. I think I'll get quite a bit of rhubarb this year. I wonder what rhubarb is used for?

Rhubarb flowering

One place where I really have weed problems is my strawberries. I've got a strawberry patch that's probably 25' long and 4' wide and the weeds are almost uncontrollable. The problem is that strawberries grow so close together that you can't get in there to get rid of the weeds. Hand weeding is too much work and there's no way to work a hoe in the tiny spaces without damaging the strawberry plants. spraying is definitely out of the question.

Always looking for an easier way to do something, I did something different this year. About a month ago, before any of the summer weeds had began to sprout, I sprayed the strawberries with a chemical called napropamide. Napropamide doesn't' kill anything that's growing but it does prevent any seeds from sprouting. The idea is that the winter weeds that were growing when I sprayed will die off when the weather warms up and the weeds that normally sprout in the Spring just won't.

strawberries (three leaves) and the weeds (everything else).

I actually think it's working. There's a lot more bare space between the strawberry plants than there was last year at this time. But I've still got some weeds in there that I have to deal with. I'd love to spray them with Roundup but I'd just end up killing the strawberries. What to do?

Not to worry, I came up with an idea. What if I had a giant magic marker, you know a 6 foot long felt tip pen that was filled with Roundup instead of ink? Then I could stick it in between the strawberries and draw the herbicide right on the weeds where I wanted it. So I built one. It's not fancy, just a few plastic pipe fittings and a 6' piece of 1/2" PVC pipe. A threaded cap on one end to allow filling the pipe with herbicide and some sort of wick on the other end to act like the felt tip.

The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death

The wick turned out to be the problem. I jambed a tightly rolled piece of cotton rag, a tightly rolled piece of felt, and a firmly compressed kitchen sponge into the end of the pipe. Each time, my test herbicide (plain water) just dripped out through the wick during each test. I can't have Roundup dripping , making little dead spots in the grass, as I walk out to the garden. The final experimental wick was a donation made by my wife. I'll just say it goes by the French word for plug. That turned out to be a failure too. I ended up just dipping the donated wick in Roundup and dabbing it on the weeds. That worked fine for today but my wick experiments are not over. It took Edison a thousand tries to find a suitable light bulb filament. When I perfect this, Maybe I'll patent the "wick hoe", otherwise known as The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death. Another garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX.

The French business end of The-Giant-Magic-Marker-O'-Death.

Salad Seeds

Earlier today I posted that it was just to wet to plant anything today. The sun and wind dried things out and My 8 year old daughter and I got a couple of rows in late this afternoon.




In my garden, some things get planted in distinct rows like corn and peppers. Other things get planted in swath's about a foot wide. That's what we did today with carrots, radish, spinach and several different types of lettuce. We raked out a flat, level row about 18 inches wide, stretched some strings across the garden to give us nice strait sides to our wide row and just broadcast the seeds on the ground between the strings. A pass with a rake to lightly cover the seeds with soil and we were done.

two new rows of spinach, lettuce, carrots, and radishes

When these come up, everything will be growing too close together and we'll have to pull most of the lettuce and spinach to make room for full sized heads. As soon as the heads get just big enough to harvest, they will be eaten by deer. When we want lettuce, we'll go to a restaurant and get the salad bar. The stuff there is going to be better than anything I could grow anyway.

The carrots, on the other hand, will not be eaten by the deer. Carrots are clever vegetables and they hide underground where the deer can't see them. The carrots will, however, be overtaken by weeds. You can't hoe or spray weeds in carrots because I grow them too close together to be able to weed between them. But the radishes will do great. They grow so fast and in cool enough weather that weeds don't get a chance to take over. Yum, baskets full of radishes.

After we planted today, I wanted to lightly water everything in. It rained quite a bit over the past couple of days but It's good to be sure. I pulled my customized sprinkler out of the shop and set it up for the first time today. Irrigating a garden this time of year is easy but as the plants get taller, they block the sprinkler from getting everything wet. A few dense rows of corn between the sprinkler and cucumbers means wilting cucumbers. The solution I came up with last year is to put the sprinkler up on a post so it can spray over the tall stuff.



Since my garden's twice as long as it is wide, I can irrigate with two sprinklers. One waters one half and the other waters the other half. But I've only got one sprinkler. No problem. I made up customized sprinkler support posts with a sleeve I can slide my sprinkler into. I water from one post on the first night and move the sprinkler to the other post the second night. A garden innovation brought to you by GardenerX. It saves time and makes watering easy. Let's be honest...gardening sucks... why make it harder than it has to be.