Saturday Chess Project Thread

Hello Saturday afternoon peeps! Wow, it's bright out here . What do you daywalkers call that big orange thing in the sky?

We were all tremendously excited to hear that Oregon Muse is recovering, but it will be a bit before he's able to resume his COB duties. Please continue to keep him and his family in your prayers.

I'm still covering the chess thread, but I'm going to be honest with y'all. The past two weeks exhausted even my pretend knowledge and silliness on the subject. I just don't have the knowledge, so I'm going to have to shelve the subject until OM is ready to resume writing the thread. I fervently hope that this is soon, but probably not as fervently as those of y'all who, you know, enjoy chess and dresses.

I don't have a theme in mind, but today I thought I'd talk about my big winter project. Be warned, however, that I'm not at the Alberta Oil Peon level. No, I'm more at this guy's level.

When we moved to this house a year and a half ago, it came with a nice big garden. The plot is 33' X 42', and last year I tilled it up and planted a conventional garden. Initially, it looked very nice.

However, mid summer we went away for a week, we all caught Covid and the next 3 weeks were rainy. I basically ignored the garden for a month, except for picking the occasional vegitable to eat, and the weeds went nuts. I mean, they got away from me fast. By the end of the summer the garden looked like this:

Actually, it looked a lot worse, that's just the last picture I took.

So, anyway, I did what any red blooded American male would do: I burned it. I took a propane torch and burned the field right down to the dirt. I decided that my winter project was going to be to make raised beds. And quite a lot of them too. The space will hold 20 4 X 8 beds, with 3' paths in between for access. The challenge was going to be making the beds without spending a fortune. I wanted to use barn tin, of which Texas has an abundance, but the problem is that everyone thinks they're Martha Stewart and that lovely old rusted barn tin will make just the cutest accent wall, so what should sell for not much is going for more than lumber. It's nuts. I finally scored 8 26” X 12' sheets for $100, enough for 8 beds.

I've built 2 of them so far, here's the result:

The chicken wire in the bottom is to prevent burrowing animals from coming up and eating my root crops. I made one bed out of 2X8s, you can see it in the background of the above picture, but lumber is dear now. That one bed cost $60 in materials! I needed another solution.

What I finally settled on was pickets. They're cheep, under $2 each, and at 6' X 5 ½ inches they're the right size for the job. The only thing is that they require a joint on the long side, but that's not too big of a deal. They're also perfect for making potato towers (foreground).

The corner posts I'm using were repurposed from shipping container supports. You can see the groove where the straps would go.

And that's my winter project this year. I'm about halfway done, yesterday I had 15 CY of bedding dirt delivered and this morning we were filling up the beds. Pro tip: Have a friendly neighbor who owns a tractor with a frontloader, it makes the job so much easier.

There's more than enough beds completed for my frost hardy crops, which go in next month, and I have until April to finish the rest, but I plan on finishing sooner. When I get to the actual planting and growing, maybe I'll ask KT if I can write a guest garden thread. It'll be like old times, that's what I started on here at the wonderful AoSHQ!

So what project do y'all have in the hopper?

Open thread.

posted by WeirdDave at 05:02 PM

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