Category: Garden

Posts about gardening and related topics, such as canning and maybe other aspects of food preservation.

Post #1722: Gas versus electric lawn mowing, part 2: The information you seek is not available.

 

Husqvarna versus Hummvee.  The one on the left is the true environmental bad guy?  Really?  Who says so?  And how do they know?

This post is the second in a series tracking down the origins of this generic statement:

  • One hour of mowing your lawn using some gas-powered lawn device
  • produces as much something-something-something
  • as 200 or 300 or 350 miles of driving something.

The information you requested is unavailable.

A good overview of this issue can be found on The Straight Dope.  Note how old that is — that posting dates to 2010.  Clearly, many variants on this one-mower-hour-equals-300-miles theme already existed at that time.  That posting specifically notes that all of the information behind that claim was made obsolete in 2012, when the EPA issued new standards for pollution from small engines.

And yet, we still see that exact same language today.  It was one hour equals 300 miles (say) 20 years ago.  And it’s the same today.  Despite the 2011/2012 EPA regulations limiting small engine pollution (Source:  EPA).  And despite two decades of changes in passenger vehicle technology and mix of vehicle types.

I get my first clue about the loosey-goosiness of this mower-versus-car statement from the California Air Resources Board (CARB), which currently says (emphasis mine):

Today, operating a commercial lawn mower for one hour emits as much smog-forming pollution as driving a new light-duty passenger car about 300 miles

Based on that critical word — commercial — maybe the commonly-cited one-hour-equals-300-miles statement has little to do with my 21″ Husqvarna mower with its Honda GVC-160 engine.  It was based on … something else.

And as I dig deeper, I’m beginning to understand why I couldn’t find any details on what these lawn-mower-versus-car statements actually mean.  After some hours of internet search, I can find authorities such as CARB that make those statements.  But I can find absolutely nothing on the details behind those statements.

In short, I know what CARB said, but I still know nothing.  I have no idea what CARB means by:

  • “a commercial lawn mower”, or
  • “a new light-duty passenger car”, or
  • “smog-forming pollution”.

As far as I can tell, CARB provides no details whatsoever.  Or, at least, none that I can find on their website.  Do they mean operating the equipment in a typical use-case, or do they mean running it full throttle, flat-out?  Do they mean a new piece of equipment, or the average mower currently in use.  How big is a commercial mower?  Does “passenger car” include SUVs or not?  Did they use a specific passenger car, such as a Prius?

And I still don’t know how to scale it down to my actual, as-used 21″ lawn mower.

Even worse, after looking into the regulations, I may never know how much pollution that mower emits.  That’s because U.S. regulations appear to be stated in terms of maximum limits, when the engine is run through a pre-defined duty cycle.   As far as I have been able to tell, nobody publishes the actual as-measured data on actual engine use.

Can you derive that statement from the regulations?

Now things get really nuts.  Even if I can’t find data on actual emissions, I ought to be able to find information on emissions limits for small engines and cars, and compare them. 

And I can do that.  The only problem is, if I do that accurately, with modern emissions limits, that makes small engines appear vastly worse than the one-hour-equals-300-mile meme suggests.

Let me start with my lawn mower, with a Honda GCV-160 engine, displacement of 160 CC or 9.8 cubic inches, rated for 4.4 horsepower or 3.3 KW.  All of that is per Honda.

Next, the EPA standard for “Class I” small portable engines is 10 grams of NOx and exhaust hydrocarbons per engine KWH per hour.  So, for the Honda engine rated at 3.3 KW, the EPA would appear to allow 33 gram per hour, combined NOx and exhaust hydrocarbons, under its mandated duty-cycle testing.

But the EPA standard for cars (shown here) works out to new-fleet average of just 0.03 grams of NOx and exhaust hydrocarbons per mile, for all passenger vehicles.

When I put those together, the exact statement appears to be that for one hour of running my Honda-powered lawn mower, the EPA allows that mower to release as much N0x and unburned hydrocarbons as (33/0.03 = ) 1100 miles of driving, by the average new gasoline-powered passenger vehicle.

I think I understand why I get such an extreme answer.  I used the modern (Tier 3) emissions standards for cars.  Those only went into place around 2017 or so.  Whereas these statements about mowers-versus-cars originated much earlier.   If I track down the Tier 2 standards for cars, and use the cleanest “bin”, the standard calls for no more than 0.125 grams NOx and unburned hydrocarbons per mile.  For that standard, the maximum allowable NOx and unburned hydrocarbon emissions from one hour of mowing equal the allowable emissions for (33/.125 =) ~250 miles of driving a typical passenger car at the maximum allowable Tier 2 emissions.

So it appears plausible that the one-hour-equals-300-miles statements derive from comparing maximum allowable levels of smog-producing exhaust emissions.  And that if anyone bothered to update those old statements to the current (Tier 3) car standards, they could make an even more extreme statement.

But.  But those are the upper limits on what is allowed.  They aren’t the actual emissions.

And none of that squares with the current CARB statement cited above.  For CARB to make that one-hour-equals-300-miles, they had to specify a commercial (presumably, large) lawn mower.

So I now think I understand how you could come up with that statement.  But I’m still not quite sure whether that statement reflects the real-world outputs of those pollutants.

Still, it remains plausible that a small lawn mower engine really is that “dirty”, by modern car standards.  The EPA estimates that modern vehicles produce about 2% of the smog-forming pollutants that (say) 1960s-era vehicles did.  And, basically, lawn mowers are still back in the 1960s in terms of pollution controls.  Catalytic converters, sealed fuel systems, exhaust-gas regeneration — all of those pollution controls are standard on cars, and unheard-of on lawn mowers.

In any case, I’m going to keep digging.  Somewhere, somebody should be able to show actual measurements of emissions of a modern lawn mower, in a form comparable to emissions measured for a modern car.

Post #1721: Gas versus electric lawn mowing, part 1: The conundrum

 

Preface:  I was an early adopter of electric lawn mowing.  Early, in this case, being somewhere around 1995, well before battery-powered electric mowers existed.  But after a couple of burnt-out mowers and many trashed extension cords, I gave up and bought an efficient gas walk-behind mower. 

That was circa 2015, and I have not looked back.  Until now.  This is the first of a series of posts looking at gas versus electric lawn mowing.

Part 1:  The conundrum

I keep reading ever-more-outlandish statements about just how much pollution gas lawn mowers generate.  Depending on which source you read, you will come across this generic format:

  • One hour of mowing your lawn using some gas-powered lawn device
  • produces as much something-something-something
  • as 200 or 300 or 350 miles of driving something.

Weirdly enough, it’s always one hour.  Everything else varies from source to source.  In addition, I am not the only person to have noticed that these car-versus-mower statements are all over the map.  This has gotten to the point where the EPA apparently doesn’t support statements like this any more (reference).

I’m sure there’s some truth in there, somewhere, but that has the look of a standard advocacy statement.  Typically, if you take one of those apart, you’ll find that somebody has purposefully created a worst-possible-case-vs-best-possible-case contrast.  Statements like that are crafted to convince rather than to inform.  And that’s done with forethought,  in pursuit of some presumed policy or economic goal.

Worse, as variants of that get tossed around, further and further from the actual research, they start to take on urban legend aspects.

Let’s play “spot the loony”.  Consider this statement, from an otherwise reputable source, Family Handyman magazine:

One hour of running a gas mower emits as much carbon dioxide as driving a car 300 miles, ...

That’s obviously a mistake.  Carbon dioxide (C02) emissions are directly proportional to the amount of gasoline burned.  Each gallon of gas generates about 20 pounds of C02 (Source:  EPA).  The average new (2021) U.S. passenger vehicle, including electric and plug-in cars, gets less than 25 MPG or equivalent (Source:  EPA).  Taken literally, the statement above says that a lawn mower burns (300/25 =) 12 gallons of gas per hour?

Must be one hell of a lawn mower.  Big agricultural combines (as above) can easily have that level of fuel consumption.  But not your typical 21-inch 3.5 HP Briggs and Stratton lawn mower.

My wife confidently informs me that we burn two gallons of gasoline per year, cutting our grass.  She’s confident because a) she mows the lawn, and b) she hates putting the gas can in her car.  So she’s sure she does that once per season.   This, on a half-acre suburban plot, less the footprint of house, driveway, and landscaping.

By contrast, for cars, in the U.S., we burn an average of about 650 gallons of gasoline per licensed driver per year (Source).  For me and my wife, if we were average, we’d be burning 1300 gallons of gasoline per year, in our car. (We aren’t — we drive a Prius Prime and arguably use about 40 gallons of gas per year in that.)

Plus two more gallons, for the lawn mower.

So there’s the conundrum.  Where does this gas-lawn-mower-as-environmental-horror-story come from, given how little fuel the typical suburbanite consumes for lawn mowing, compared to driving?

For sure, the carbon footprint of our gas lawn mower is rounding error in the context of total household fossil fuel use.  Not because small gas engines are any great shakes.  Simply because the fuel used to mow the lawn is negligible.

For perspective, using Virginia’s power generation mix (0.65 lbs C02 per KWH), two gallons of gasoline generates as much C02 as 60 kilowatt-hours, or roughly 160 watt-hours per day.   Based on these typical wattages, the gas lawn mower has the same carbon footprint as the following daily use of these home appliances:

In short, for my primary environmental concern — global warming — mowing the lawn just doesn’t matter.  Or, it matters less than many other common activities of daily living, such as washing dishes or watching TV.

But I still would like to know the full story here,  Given the small amount of gasoline consumed, how closely does whatever-it-is that is the underlying research actually apply to my situation?  Should I consider early retirement for my gas lawn mower, in favor of battery-powered?  Should I plan on buying a battery-powered mower if and when my current one dies?

I already know some of the answers.

Briefly:   First, the horror story is about smog (not carbon footprint).  Second, it focuses on major small-engine consumers of gasoline.  The total environmental impact appears to have been estimated based on consumption of 3 billion gallons of gasoline annually, for lawn and garden equipment.  With lawns surrounding roughly 100 million U.S. households, that works out to about 30 gallons of gas, per lawn, per year.  Or about 15 times the rate at which my mower uses gas.

The upshot is that I’m not deeply concerned about this.  But I would like to know more.  The rest of the posts in this series will dig a little deeper into this, including (if possible) finding the original EPA research that has spawned this class of gas-lawn-mower-bad advocacy statements.

More to come.  It’s a nice day.  I’m going to go work in the yard now.

G23-012: Luke 13:6-9, and the chainsaw of time.

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’ ”

— Luke 13:6–9, New Revised Standard Version, via Wikipedia.

Dödsträdgårdsskötsel

I’m not normally one for literal interpretation of the Bible.  But in this case, I’m going for it.

I have a fig tree that will not bear fruit.  I have now made up my mind to give it the final New Testament treatment, as above. After which, I shall cast it into the fire.  Once the wood has seasoned enough to burn well.

I’m not quite sure what prompted me to take action.  I’ve been putting in new raised beds.  After my Nth shovelful of dirt, I kind of woke up and realized that I had been looking at the same big, ugly fig bush for going on 15 years now.  Patiently waiting that one more year, for fruit that never appeared.  Year after year after year.

But once my eyes were opened, I could not help but notice the fig was just one of many lingering gardening failures that fill my yard.   The in-ground deer-feeding stations that were mistakenly labeled “blueberry bushes” when we bought them.  The 30′ tall fruit trees bought as dwarf varieties.  The landscaping that has to be hacked back twice a year so that the mail carrier can get to the front door.  The azaleas that overtop the windows.  And so on.

Nothing that, by itself, jumped out at me.  Nothing that couldn’t be ignored for yet another year.  Just the result of slow accretion over time.  A bush here, a tree there.  And as long as I could still walk around in the back yard, I let them be.

It finally dawned on me that the outside of my house was just like the inside.  It was full of stuff that I had accumulated over the years.  Stuff that no reasonable person would want, de novo.  Stuff that I kept only because, at some point, I bought it.

The fig tree that would not bear fruit made me see that it was time for some dödsträdgårdsskötsel.  A bit of Swedish death landscaping, to match the döstädning (Swedish death cleaning) I’ve been doing inside (Post #1667).

 

Never a dull moment

That’s when I decided to pull out my chain saw.  Because, hey, what could possibly go wrong when an old, out-of-shape Joe Homeowner with mobility issues decides to chain-saw down a bunch of trees.  In close proximity to buildings and fences.  Trailing a great big power cord.

In all seriousness, my wife forbade me to use my chain saw when she’s not around.  And rightly so.  She’s the designated dialer.  This, under the theory that it might be a challenge to type 9-1-1 with the stump of an arm, before I bleed out.

 

Much like the trees I’m going to cut down, this chainsaw is a leftover from an earlier time.  I bought it when I was much younger.  It’s not clear at this point that I should have kept it.  Arguably, it may now be an age-inappropriate power tool.   But unlike a geezer in a sports car, there’s no equivalent of the DMV to make me prove periodically that I’m still capable of using it.  Thus, the decision to put down that chain saw, once and for all, is supported by the slenderest of reeds, the common sense of the aging user.

But, my life is pretty dull.  My health insurance is paid up.  So what the heck.

To be clear, this is about as wimpy as chain saws got, back in the day.  It’s a Sears Craftsman 18″ plug-in electric chain saw.  That size being about as big as electric chainsaws can get, and still operate on a standard 120V household circuit.

That said, a wimpy chain saw is a like a low-powered shotgun shell.  Use it wrong, and there’s no question it’s going to hurt.  It’s only a question of how badly.

I recalled that the last time I used it, the blade seemed a bit dull. 

Which, by itself, sent me down a little philosophical trail, trying to recall how often I had used that chainsaw.  I definitely recalled cutting up some firewood at my current house.  Which led me to my wife’s grandmother, because I distinctly recall cutting up a bunch of firewood for her, a few years back.  And I was pretty sure I hadn’t sharpened or changed that chain in the intervening years.

Seemed like that might have been a few years ago, that I did that little favor for my wife’s grandmother.  So I checked with my wife. Her grandmother passed away 25 years ago, in 1997.

The upshot is that the chain is the original.  It was on the saw when I bought it about 30 years ago.  It was on it when I cut up that firewood for my wife’s grandmother.  When I cleared trees and brush from my last house.  When I cut up my own firewood.  And it just got duller and duller, so gradually that each time I used it, well, it worked about as well as the last time I used it.  And as long as it still worked, I wasn’t going to mess with it.

Anyway, I splurged for a new chain.  They still make them to fit, and a new one is about $12.

The upshot is that my 30-year-old electric chain saw cuts like it’s brand-new.  Took maybe two minutes to cut down that non-productive fig bush.

I retain all of my appendages.  So far. And I’m looking forward to taking down the rest of my landscaping mistakes when the rain lets up.

So, happy ending all around.

Any larger lesson?

I was going to try for some sort of larger life lesson here, but it’s not worth the effort.  The larger lessons are pretty obvious.  Age creeps up on you.  Getting rid of stuff is just part of life.

I guess the only one that surprised me is that a chainsaw with a new blade is a joy to use.  I spent years struggling with a dull blade on that saw.  And so I missed out on a lot of joy.  All for my unwillingness to spend $12 for a new blade. I now wonder how much of the rest of my life has been like that.  And whether its too late to change those long-ingrained habits of cheapness.

 

G23-011: Allow me to gift you some top soil.

 

I knew my world was going to hell when I had to use “gift” as a verb.  Unironically.   And cease all use of the archaic verb form “give”, or risk sounding like a geezer.

Gift-the-verb apparently comes naturally to twenty-somethings. And I can can grit my teeth and do that in writing.  But it still grates if I have to speak it.

Try these on:

“I gift you this gift, in the spirit of holiday gift-gifting.”

“It’s the gift that keeps on gifting.”

If my inability to utter such abominations doesn’t do enough to mark me as old, I can recall a time when I did not have to read the fine print on a bag of dirt. (The reading glasses I now need to do that are just so much salt, or perhaps dirt, in the wound.)

Which brings me to the subject of today’s rant:  Dirt.  Yes, dirt. Because, these days, you don’t know what your bag o’ dirt contains, unless you read the list of ingredients.

Here’s the issue. I thought that “soil”, as used in the garden, had a well-defined and universally-recognized meaning:  Dirt.  Soil means dirt.  Or, at least, soil contains dirt, along with and other stuff.  But, first and foremost, finely weathered rock.  Inorganic material.

This matters, because dirt is forever.  Or, at least, dirt doesn’t rot. Dirt is the mineral, inorganic component of soil.  Fill a raised bed with dirt, and you’re done.  Next year, the dirt will still be there.  Year after.  And so on.

As I reconfigured my raised beds this year, I realized I needed a bit more dirt.  So I went to Home Depot and bought some bags of topsoil.  Because soil — dirt — is what I need to fill those beds.  And topsoil is nicer than, say, fill dirt.

Turns out, the idea that “top soil” is mostly “dirt” is not even remotely true.  Worse, everybody in the hardware industry now appears to accept that as normal.  Unironically.

Long and the short of it is that I purchased a dozen cubic-foot bags of mulch, at my local Home Depot.  Only, the bags didn’t say mulch.  They said “top soil”.  Like so:

Source:  Home Depot.  Circles in red are mine.  Image at top of page has been altered for humorous effect.

But it’s just mulch.  It’s 100% organic material.  It’s very nice-looking mulch.  But there’s zero dirt there.  Everything in the bag will rot away.  As I found out only after opening a bag, and then reading the fine print on the back.

In my defense, note that they tell me to use this to fill holes in my yard!  Use it to level up raised beds!

So I guess my problem is that I could not conceive of being a big enough moron to fill in a hole in my lawn, with mulch. Organic mulch rots.  It’s not a permanent fix.  Where this manufacturer is located, do they patch potholes in the road with mulch?  Do they fix cracked sidewalks with mulch?  Then the same logic applies to fixing a hole in your lawn.

Long story short, the manufacturer both labeled the bag as soil, and told me to use it for filling holes.  Crazily enough, I assumed it was dirt.  Or, at least, mostly dirt.  Maybe I’d settle for “contained some dirt”.

But nope.  Not a spec of dirt to be found.  It’s well-rotted wood compost.

Worse, all the topsoils in this store, and its nearest competitor (Lowe’s), appear to be the same.  They are just mulch.  Even the “garden soils” and “raised bed soils” appear to be 100% rotted organic matter.  Judging by the website, I can’t actually buy dirt from the garden center of my local Home Depot or Lowe’s.

Maybe I never could.  When I filled these beds originally, I had the dirt trucked in, in bulk.  It’s starting to look like the only way I can buy actual dirt is to have it trucked in again.

When I set about redoing these beds, the last thing I worried about was finding the dirt to fill them.  Turns out, that’s probably going to be the most difficult piece of it.

Post G23-010: No-dig potatoes, using leaf mulch

Today is St. Patrick’s day.

That’s the traditional day for planting potatoes, in this climate.

But my new raised beds aren’t ready yet.  And the old ones are a weedy mess.  Which I didn’t much feel like hoeing out of the way, this rainy St. Patrick’s day morning.

So I planted this year’s potatoes as no-dig (no-till) potatoes.  I placed them on top of an existing weedy garden bed, and buried them under half-a-foot of free leaf mulch.

Edit 7/23/2023:  Near-total failure.  See Post G23-041. Continue reading Post G23-010: No-dig potatoes, using leaf mulch

Post G23-009: New garden beds. Working harder, not smarter.

 

At the start of the pandemic, I recycled some political yard signs and bamboo into a set of raised garden beds (Post G05).   After three years of intensive use, a) those are now in disrepair, and b) I know a whole lot more about gardening.

My plan is to replace those beds with something better.  With St. Patrick’s day just one week away — the traditional day for planting potatoes — I can’t procrastinate much longer.   Time to finish pondering and start shoveling.

This post documents the final design.  The next post will show the construction.

Continue reading Post G23-009: New garden beds. Working harder, not smarter.

Post G23-008: Simple geometry of sun and shade, or, keep your gnomon pointing north.

 

This post is about making sure my new garden beds don’t end up in the shadow of my back porch, during the summer.  Based on the length of the shadows today, in late winter.  And, ultimately, based simply on the height of the porch roof.

To cut to the chase:  If you use Excel, and the NOAA sun-angle calculator, you can accurately predict the length of a shadow, for any date and time, anywhere on earth, via this formula:

Shadow length = obstruction height * cotangent (solar elevation angle in degrees * π / 180)

The π / 180 is there because Excel wants to see angles expressed in radians.  If you’re using a calculator that accepts angles in degrees, omit that.

 

Continue reading Post G23-008: Simple geometry of sun and shade, or, keep your gnomon pointing north.

G23-006: The sunniest spot in a shady yard? Part 1, geometry.

 

This is the first of two posts on finding the sunniest spot in a yard that has shade trees on either side.  This one uses geometry.  The next one will use time-lapse photography on a sunny day.

With any luck, both approaches will tell me the same thing.

If your yard is bordered by shade trees, locate the beds so that due south (180 degrees) splits the compass bearing from your bed to each line of trees.  This gives a surprising-looking result for my back yard.  It’s not at all what you’d naively think, just looking at the trees and the yard.

Garden bed location 1:  Wrong.

I started gardening seriously during the pandemic.  Temporary raised beds were made from recycled campaign yard signs and bamboo.  I placed those in seemingly-reasonable locations in my back yard. In part, they were filling in low spots on the lawn.  But it seemed like they were located so as to get the best sun.

I’m now getting around to putting in something more permanent.  This time, I’m not going to wing it, but instead want to know what spot in my back yard gets the most sunlight.

It’s not obvious.  I have tall trees on either edge of my yard.  And, interestingly enough, what appears to be the obvious solution — locate the garden beds in the middle of the yard, away from both tree lines — isn’t even close to being right.

So, eyeball a couple of birds’-eye views of my back yard, and see if you think I put the beds in roughly the right place:

Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?  You might even say that the location doesn’t much matter, because you’re going to get the same number of hours of sunlight almost anywhere in that back yard, regardless.  What’s shaded in the morning will be sunny in the afternoon, and vice-versa.

Problem is, an hour of sun is not an hour of sun.  Sunlight is much stronger around solar noon, and is weaker the farther you are from noon.  And, because the sun is due south at noon (in the Northern hemisphere), you have to know which direction is south, in order to judge what part of the yard gets the most solar energy.

Source:  Curtonics.com

You need to figure out the locations in your yard that place due south directly between those lines of trees.  Those locations get the greatest amount of high-intensity, near-noon sunlight.

To cut to the chase, you need to calculate where your potential garden site is, relative to the obstructing trees, and to due south.  The sunniest locations in the yard will have these two properties.

  • Due south (180 degrees) bisects the angle from your location to each side of obstructing trees.  E.g., find a spot where the bearing to one set of trees is 150 degrees (180 – 30), and the bearing to the other set of trees is 210 degrees (180 + 30).  That is, you get equal hours of morning and afternoon sun.
  • The angle from your location, to the obstructing trees, is as wide as possible.  For example, the location with a 60 degree spread above will get more total sunlight than a location with a 40 degree spread.   That is, you get as many total hours of sun as possible.

So now, take a look at my back yard, oriented so that south is directly down.  Do you want to change your prior answer?  By the look of the shadows, this is about 11 AM solar time.  Note that the left edge of the yard is already in sunlight.

 

Skirting a couple of pitfalls.

Let me take a brief break to mention a couple of pitfalls that can mess up your attempts to locate your garden in the sunniest spot on the yard.

Daylight savings time.  Man I hate having to get up at 2 AM to turn all the clocks forward, as required by law.  But the upshot is that solar noon occurs around 1 PM during daylight savings time.  For example, on the hourly insolation graph above, peak insolation occurs around 13:00, or 1 PM.  That’s not a mistake, that’s just daylight savings time.  So if it’s summer, and you look to see where the shadows fall at noon, you’re screwing up.  Because noon, daylight savings time, is actually 11 AM solar time.

Above:  Compass set up for 10 degrees west magnetic declination

Magnetic declination.  Declination is the extent to which magnetic north — where the compass needle points — deviates from true north.  Because of magnetic declination, you can’t simply use the raw readings from a standard magnetic compass in order to locate your garden in the right spot.

If you have a compass made for use on land, and it’s anything but the most basic compass, chances are you can adjust the compass to account for declination.

You can find the magnetic declination for your locality at the US Geological Survey, among other places. Currently, magnetic declination at Vienna VA is about 10 degrees west.  That means that the compass needle actually points to a heading of about 350 degrees, not 360 degrees (true north).  That’s about 2.5 degrees further west than when I was a kid in the 1970s.

Magnetic declination is one of those incredibly simple topics that always manages to get an incredibly opaque explanation.  But as long as you have a compass that can be set to account for your local declination, it’s really simple.  The picture above shows a compass set up for 10 degrees west declination.  Despite the fuzziness of the photo, I think it’s obvious that the compass body has been offset 10 degrees relative to the degree ring.  When the needle points to 350 degrees (10 degrees west of true north), 360 or 0 on the degree ring shows you true north.

The sunniest spots in my back yard are directly next to the trees.

I can now take Google Earth, and start drawing in the angles between various backyard locations, and the ends of the lines of shading trees at the sides of the yard.  It’s a little crude, but the conclusion is inescapable.  I put the temporary beds too close to the middle of the yard.  For the most solar energy possible, they ought to be almost under the trees at the side of the yard.  Like so:

Which, to be honest, I would not have guessed, just eyeballing it.

Over the coming weekend, I’ll set up a stop-motion camera to film my back yard for one sunny day.  With that, I should be able to validate that the area that gets the most solar energy is the one outlined.  And I should be able to determine just how much energy I lose if I move away from that optimum spot.

Post G23-004: Garden plan, 2023, step 2: When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

 

People say the ancients constructed their calendars to keep track of religious holidays, based on astronomical events.  Possibly true.  But a nice side benefit of their religion is that it gave them a clear idea of when to plant their crops in the spring.

In the modern world, of course, we eschew such religion-based planting rituals.  Thus my potatoes will go in the ground on St. Patrick’s day, and no sooner.  Because that’s Science.

If left to my own devices, I would undoubtedly plant too early.  Hence the need for my quasi-religious planting ritual.  Here in Vienna VA, today’s high is expected to be near 80.  Which definitely gets me in a gardening frame of mind.  But tomorrow’s low is well below freezing.  We’re still six weeks from our likely last-frost date.

Without getting into whys and wherefores of our ever-wackier weather, this post  presents my vegetable garden plan for the year.  It takes the form of three questions:

  • Why?
  • What?
  • How?

A brief recap

I started my current round of gardening in order to have something to do during the pit of the COVID-19 pandemic.  If nothing else, shoveling around a few tons of dirt to create raised beds provided much-needed exercise (Post G05).

Many people did the same, leading to shortages of everything gardening-related in 2020.  Starting with empty seed racks at my local hardware stores (Post #G02, April 21, 2020) and ending with a long-lasting shortage of canning jar lids (Post #G21, August 2020).

Gardening was a much nicer experience then than now.  The cessation of much local and long-distance travel meant that the air was cleaner, the skies were blue-er (Post #614, Post #618) , and neighborhoods were a lot quieter.  So quiet I could hear the hum of the bees at work in the garden (Post #G11), a sound I have not heard since.  A big bed of sunflowers, just outside my bedroom window, provided much-needed cheer during what was otherwise a fairly dark time.

But now, the air once again stinks of diesel exhaust, the Northern Virginia summer sky has returned to its traditional smog-white, the constant noise of traffic and construction smothers sound of the bees, and gyms are open for business.

In other words, things are back to normal.

1:  Why?  It’s now my hobby.

When I distill it down, I’m going to continue to garden for four reasons.

One, it gives me a physical activity that actually has a purpose.  Sure, I can go to the gym, and get exercise for exercise’s sake.  I can walk around the neighborhood, for the sake of walking around the neighborhood.  Gardening is a way to get non-pointless exercise.

Two, I really like growing plants.  I guess I can come out and say that.  Mostly food.  But flowers are OK, in moderation.

Third, I’m cheap.  As hobbies go, annual costs don’t get much cheaper than a few pounds of potatoes and a few packets of seeds.  I’m not convinced that my gardening pays for itself in the value of produce.  But the fact that I get anything at all useful out of a hobby is a bonus in and of itself.

Finally, it leaves nothing permanent.  What isn’t eaten turns to compost.  So, unlike (say) woodworking, this doesn’t produce yet-more-clutter, during a period of my life when I’m doing my best to get rid of stuff

2:  What? Only stuff we like to eat.

In an intellectual breakthrough this year, I’ve decided on the following guidelines:

  1. Only plant stuff that we actually like to eat.
  2. Don’t plant stuff that the deer like to eat
  3. Don’t  plant stuff that the bugs like to eat.
  4. Don’t plant stuff susceptible to diseases common in my garden.

Being the kind of guy I am, I of course formalized that with a spreadsheet.  But it doesn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know.

Yellow:  Certain herbs and herb-like plants rank highly here because they are extremely easy to grow, take up little room and cost an arm and a leg at the store.  So, dill and rosemary, which I already grow, and ginger and turmeric, which are apparently easy to grow from grocery-store-purchased product.

Light blue:  Potatoes, sweet potatoes, and winter squash. These all provide a lot of calories per square foot and (so far) have been both extremely easy to grow and highly productive in my garden.  Plus, we like to eat them.

Red:  Tomatoes and sweet peppers.  Easy to grow, we like to eat them.  Say no more.

Dark blue:  The entire garlic and onion clan.  I’ve had such spotty luck with these over the years, I’m going to skip them this year.  Plus, my yields have been lousy.

Green:  Peas, beans, lettuce, okra.  We like to eat them just fine, but all require significant fuss.  And, except for green beans, in a good year, yields are modest at best.  But peas and lettuce can go in when it’s cold, and my wife likes green beans.  So these are definitely going to get planted.  Some.  Not a lot.

Purple:  Cucumbers and summer squash.  I’ve had such a bad time with insect pests that I’m skipping those this year.

3:  How?  When you come to a fork in the road, take it.

After three years in the Virginia climate, my temporary raised beds are “showing their age”.  Which is a nice way of saying “falling apart”.  I put up a set of temporary raised beds during the pandemic, recycling some yard signs, bamboo, and other materials around the yard.  Their temporary nature is now showing pretty badly.

I did that to minimize my investment.  I figured that if gardening didn’t work out, I could just tear them apart, spread the dirt on the low spots on the lawn, and plant grass.  Nothing wasted.  Nothing headed for the landfill that wasn’t already headed there before I tried gardening.

So I’ve reached a fork in the road.  Either I do what I had planned on originally, take the beds down, use the dirt to even out the lawn, and be done with gardening.  Or kick it up a notch.

Separately, things snowballed beyond the mere construction of the beds.  In addition to the beds, I now have irrigation line, various types of row cover and insect netting, trellising material, tomato cages, deer deterrent devices, and so on.  Not a huge dollar investment, as these things go.  But it’s a lot of stuff that serves no purpose outside of gardening.

The upshot is that I’m now going to go back and do this right.   But only as a last resort.  The patchwork of temporary beds of varying depths, oriented along the low spots of the lawn, will be replaced by a single long bed oriented east-west, with a permanent trellis along the back.  This will simplify everything from irrigation to protection against deer, and dovetail with the remaining in-ground beds that are now devoted to cane fruits.

I quite like the coroplast (yard sign) sides, and as I have several long sheets of that around, the new bed is going to be coroplast-and-post as well.  I see no reason to import materials if I have durable materials on hand that would otherwise be trash.

As an extra added bonus, this allows me to re-shovel the multiple tons of dirt that I ordered in the first place.  Much better than wasting my time at the gym.  And see how my hugelculture experiment turned out.  There are trash pieces of wood at the bottoms of all these beds, and I’ll get to see what happened to them after three years in the soil.

The goal is to have a single, well-constructed bed of uniform depth, with trellising, deer protection, and irrigation built in.  We’ll see how close I come to that ideal.

 Conclusion

After three years of seat-of-the-pants gardening in temporary raised beds, I have reached a fork in the road.  I’m going to take what I learned in the past three years, and move forward with a single permanent bed incorporating everything I think I need to grow a bit of vegetables and flowers in my back yard.  And at that point, I’ll focus on a few things that we really like to eat fresh out of the garden and that seem to grow well in this climate.  And hope for the best.