On second thought

I’ve planted watermelons. Little round black ones, if the photo on the seed packet is to be believed, chosen for small fruit in the Japanese style. Small fruit has several advantages. They are lighter – on this steep slope, large fruit might pull off the vine. Also, smaller fruit fit in the fridge better.

Something is munching on this Asian lettuce, yet hasn’t touched the iceberg lettuce next to it.

Closer inspection reveals grubs under the leaves. Sorry about the focus but it’s a phone camera and the auto-focus latched onto the leaf edges further back. It’s not great for macro photography.

Elsewhere things are thriving. Plants, I mean. Obviously those grubs were thriving. I sprayed them with Rogor. Tomorrow we’ll see whether they’re thriving or composting. This plant’s a write-off, but I don’t want them spreading.

My rosemary, healthy but somehow dormant for so long, has finally decided to grow. It’s very plump and green but I think it likes drier conditions than the rest of this bed, and should probably be elsewhere.

The lemon thyme is blooming.

And here are some shots of the river. As you can see we are in dire need of a slasher.

Looking west along the high bank shoulder, across the neighbour’s yard. They turfed their weedy desert, and now ours looks ratty by contrast.

The thyme is flowering. Both flavours.

No need to mulch here.

Finally, the fruit are ripening.

You know what they say about men with big hands. They have huge lettuces.

Iceberg, not far behind.

Bee careful.

Scary creatures inhabit the green depths.

The tin shed that will house garden tools and chemicals, seedlings and so forth.

Everything is so small from up here.

If I don’t pluck that mignonette lettuce tonight it will go to seed. That might not be so bad; self-seeding is good.

I found mint growing wild. Went to pull a weed and what do you know, it’s mint. Mint takes over the world, so it’s now mint in this tub.

This is a Mignonette lettuce, which is ironic because it’s neither small nor cute. This thing is the size of my head and still growing.

The garden has reached a size where one big sprinkler in the middle is no longer sufficient to distribute the water evenly, and so I finally put in more elaborate watering.

More watering gear, and the lower lettuce bench.

This shot shows both the extended watering that now includes the peach trees, and the end-cap for the western path bench.

I got tired of the end of this bench slipping under me so I capped and filled it.

More mint (top bin) and coriander. The last batch bolted early, so these ones are in the shade of the tomatoes (bolting is caused by excessive heat and/or too much sun).

I guess the builder let an apprentice put the door handles on our house. Four of them, the holes are off centre and one side of the handle assembly is unsupported and collapsing into it.

If the hole were correctly positioned there would be no problem. If the hole were smaller, the margin for error would have been larger and the positioning wouldn’t have been a problem.

So how do you make a hole smaller?

It was cut with a hole saw. I have one of those, and it didn’t take long to find a blade of the (standard) size used to cut the hole.

I bought some timber the same thickness as a standard internal door (38mm) and cut a hole in it. After removing the door handle/latch assembly, I found the resultant plug fit nicely into the hole. I glued it in place using two-pack epoxy, which was a mistake but not a disaster.

Cutting the plug left a centring hole in it, and this was very handy for positioning a 22mm barrel auger to cut a much smaller hole for the handle crossbars.

A 25mm auger extended the existing lock barrel hole through the plug.

I screwed the thread barrels onto one of the handle assemblies and used a crossbar to position it correctly. Tapping the handle smartly with a rubber mallet marked the plug with the positions for the 5mm thread barrel courses. Inserting the handle assembly allowed me to use the lock pin hole in the handle assembly to mark the position for the 5mm lock pin course.

I used a drill guide to help me keep the drill perpendicular to the door, and drilled right through for the thread barrel courses, and halfway for the lock pin. The whole thing needed assembly several times to check course positioning, with adjustments using a routing bit, and then it was a simple matter of assembly.

The first one was a mess. Positioning was a bit rough, and crud stuck to the job as well as little hard strands of epoxy. But all the defects are presentational: sandpaper and paint are all that’s required to perfect the work.

I learn from my mistakes, and the second one went far more smoothly. Instead of epoxy I used PVC wood glue, which takes much longer to hold-set but cleans off with a damp cloth.

The door material through which the lock barrel hole was cut was soft and porous, probably some sort of low density fibreboard (aka shitboard). I smeared the inside of the hole with PVC glue. The porous material absorbed quite a lot of glue. My purpose in doing this was to improve the integrity of the material while I was using it as a guide, and this proved very successful.

By the third try I learnt to bore the lock barrel hole before the crossbar hole, and to bore the crossbar hole as inwards from both sides into the resultant cavity, resulting in a better finish. In addition, the positioning error (for the original oversize hole) was less severe for the second, third and fourth jobs, and no plug timber is visible past the outer handle assembly sleeve. As a result, only the first job requires cosmetic touch-up.

The ripening of fruit is a high energy process set off by a biological trigger.

The trigger is the presence of acetylene gas. The higher the concentration, the faster the fruit will ripen. This principle is used by supermarkets to force-ripen fruit in response to consumer demand.

However, fruit ripened in this manner is grossly inferior. Recall that ripening is a high-energy process. Vine-ripened fruit are supplied with large quantities of sugars, antioxidants and nutrients in general by the plant. Force ripening of fruit in a warehouse produces only the appearance of ripeness; the flavour is bland and the fruit poor sustenance.

Fruit can also be force-ripened on the vine by enclosing the fruit – or the whole plant – and supplying acetylene to the enclosure. There are various ways to go about this. The primary domestic method is to put a bag over the fruit and place ripening bananas in the bag. This method has tremendous advantages for the home grower because it is possible to ripen fruit progressively rather than all at once. The bag also keeps pests off the fruit.

Ripening bananas emit a steady trickle of acetylene. The more bananas, the more acetylene. The larger your enclosure, the more acetylene you will need. For tent type enclosures over several plants, bottled acetylene may be used, especially when bananas are unavailable.

Acetylene from carbide

It is possible to make acetylene from calcium carbide. Place a small lump of carbide in a flat metal tray and arrange a drip feed of water onto the carbide. You control the rate of reaction by limiting the rate of supply of water. Do not drop a lump of carbide in a bucket of water to see what happens, it will react too fast generating heat and acetylene, which is the highly flammable gas used in a cutting torch. While a bucket full of water will absorb quite a lot of the heat making explosion unlikely, the large quantities of acetylene produced may be toxic.

When the carbide has been consumed there will be a paste of calcium hydroxide in water. This is a strong bleach, so take care disposing of it.