I have known a lot of people over the years. But my life has been one of a nomad. I have moved so many times that I have developed very few of those really deep friendships that require years to develop.
Friday I had a chance to see one of those friends. Dean Curtis is The friend who has done the most to stay in close contact with me over the many years. We developed our friendship starting about when our two boys were born in 1992. His son Andy and my son Brandt grew up together. They attended play groups and daycare together, our wives worked together, and our families spent a lot of time together. We got to be very close over the years. Then in 2001 when we moved to Australia, Dean was there for some 15 or 20 going away parties as our departure date to move to Australia kept getting moved back in the days following 911.
Dean captures a screenshot to upload to social media.
When we can back to the US in 2004, the welcome home party was at Dean and Cindy’s house. We haven’t seen each other too many times since then, but I often get a phone call from him. He is always telling me to eat my green leafy vegetables and has a fun inside joke that I won’t embarrass my wife by sharing the details.
Anyway, we got a chance to see his family again this Friday at his son Andy’s Senior Vocal Recital at St. Olaf. College. His son performed one of the most amazing shows I have ever seen by an amateur. And we were there.
It was great to see our old friends who have gone out of their way to maintain our friendship. And as the cliche goes, it was as if we had seen each other yesterday.
This is the first flower I saw this spring so I thought I would share it.
This, I believe, is a white Magnolia. It is the first thing I have seen bloom this year.
A row of three or 4 of these trees line the street between Wilson Park and Heritage Hall on the UW-Stout campus in Menomonie. I’m not going to have a lot of time to dedicate to writing today, so I thought I would just throw up some spring eye candy. Enjoy!
This is day 25, that means I am halfway to my goal of 50 days blogging in a row. Actually, there was one day I missed while I was traveling, but still not bad. Today is a day of reflection.
A view of spring seedlings popping up underneath the reflection of the clouds from my cold frame.
I have done my best to stay away from politics, work and religion because this blog project was an effort to allow me to think about other things. It seems I have spent the last 25 days blogging about:
Arts
Education
Food
Friends
Garden
Live
Love
Pondering
Reusing
Stage, and
Work (but not employment work, more like garden work).
It has been a chance for me to reflect on the things that I hold dear in life, and it has been a success so far. I have learned that it is really harder than you might imagine to blog every day. Coming up with a topic is sometimes the hardest part. I have had to rely on using photos that I have taken either during this period or in previous years to provide the visuals and sometimes the inspiration.
I have learned a lot. For instance, my Google Analytics gives me a pretty good picture of how people are visiting my blog.
This image shows the analytics behind my first 25 days of blogging
From this data I can tell that there have been 305 visits to my site by 161 unique users. They have read 559 pages of my content and they average almost two pages per visit. Almost half of the visits to my site are by returning visitors, that is good.
If I look at the peaks and valleys, I find that when I am talking about Little Women I get the most visits, when I am talking about my garden I get the fewest. The spike on April 14 is from when I posted the pictures of the Little Women Rehearsal. This post was also shared to a facebook page created for the cast and crew, and some of them shared it on their Facebook profiles. That explains the spike.
The comments are interesting. Most of them come from people I know, but the spammers found me pretty quick.
Anyway, thanks for following my blog. I hope you find it interesting or entertaining.
For most people, the compost pile is not something worthy of a blog post. But for the true gardeners, there is an understanding that the compost pile is the heart of the garden.
At the most fundamental level, composting is easy. You throw a bunch of organic matter in a pile and leave it there to rot. But as you spend more time gardening, and seasons composting, you start to learn that there is composting and then there is composting. I am not going to go into the chemistry and process of composting. I have nothing to add that hasn’t been spoken about before.
But what I can do is share with you the evolution of my composting pile. When I first started out I decided to use a wire frame cylindrical frame. This was easy to set up and did a good job of containing the compost, but it was hard to mix, and the good stuff was down at the bottom out of reach. That combined with placing it in a shaded area meant I didn’t get the results I wanted as fast as I wanted. I needed more compost than I could produce, so I moved on.
This wire circle was my first compost pile. I made the mistake of putting it in the shaded corner of the yard where it didn’t get enough light to really heat up.
The next evolution of the compost pile found me out in a sunny area. I had learned about the three bin method, where you migrate the compost from one bin to the next as it aged. This process allows you to turn over the pile and aerate it as you move it from one bin to the next. And that is the way to keep your compost hot, make sure it gets plenty of air down in the composting materials. You also need to have the right combination of green and brown materials, but the real key is air and moisture.
The pallets were used to create a three bin compost pile.
This worked pretty well, but I still found myself needing more compost than I could produce in this way. So, I went to the next version, they straw bale enclosure.
The idea behind the straw bale compost is pretty easy. You use straw bales to build the container that the compost goes into. This provides a barrier that helps keep the heat in during the colder months so you can compost when other methods would have shut down. Along the way, the straw bales start to compost themselves and provide additional carbon materials (brown) to the compost pile. I would cover it with a black tarp to trap in the heat and keep out excess water, and I would hold the plastic down with, you guessed it, old pallets.
This shows how the pile covered in plastic.
I got a couple of years out of the straw bales, but they eventually broke down into compost. The image below shows it the second and last year that I used straw bales. That year I decided that I still needed more compost than I was producing. That fall, after watching truck after truck drive by bringing leaves to the dump, I decided that it was silly for them to drive by my house on the way when I could use them for my compost. So, I invited a few of the neighbors to bring me their leaves and I ended up with a much bigger compost pile, and a tradition that continues today.
The straw bales break down and the pile becomes less contained.
I now had a reasonable amount of compost, and it allowed me to leave some there during the year. And what I found out, is that during the summer, the location that normally holds the compost pile, really want things to grow. So I have experimented with things like potatoes, and squash, pumpkins and tomatoes, and really anything that wants to grow there. At the very least, it will become next year’s compost.
For some reason, things want to grow in my compost pile.Another view of the compost pile in relation to the rest of the garden
This last fall I went all the way and put up a sign that said “taking leaves” beside the road inviting the entire neighborhood to bring in their leaves. And several did. I ended up with a very large compost pile. It is big enough now that it takes up the whole area behind the white fence, and is about 5 feet deep in the fall, and about 3 1/2 feet deep in the spring. Then a couple of weeks ago I had a friend call and ask if they could bring in their leaves, grass clippings and pine needles to throw on my pile. “Well yeah!”
So now I have this really massive compost pile. It is a bit of work to turn it over, but I do that to keep it composting hot. Last Sunday I reached my hand into the middle of the pile and it was HOT! That is exactly what you want.
The pile at the beginning of spring, and before a friend brought in another truck load of stuff.
I think this year I may have enough compost. It still has some rotting to do, but another 4 weeks and it should be mostly ready to spread. And my garden is going to love it.
It is hard to believe that it has been almost 29 years since my grandfather died. Fritz and I were buddies. He was that special adult in my life that had a significant influence on me, and has always held a special place in my heart. And, for as long as I can remember, he had one of these tractors out in the yard. I don’t remember him ever actually touching it, but for some reason it is firmly tied to my memory of him.
I have been waiting 29 years to get one of these.
There weren’t many toys at my grandparent’s house. A couple of old toy tractors, mini bikes, riding lawn mowers, real tractors, and guns were the things we had to entertain ourselves. Oh, and of course the millions of things that you find on a farm in West Texas. But, for whatever reason I just loved that tractor sprinkler.
This picture shows most of the mechanism that makes this thing work.
The engineering behind this is quite brilliant. Technically I think it is referred to as a walking sprinkler. The intended function is to move forward as it waters the lawn/garden. It is designed to follow the hose, with the front tire being designed to fit over the hose. The water hose is connected to the tractor and turned on. The water flows out through the swing arms and forces an inclined plane to rotate. That is interconnected with a gear that us turned by the rotation of the inclined plane. Attached to the gear are two arms, each extending to a swinging metal tooth. The tooth is designed such that as it moves forward in the rotation the tooth pushes another gear, which is the tractor’s tire causing it to turn and propel the tractor forward. As the tooth swings back, it freely flops over the teeth of the wheel gear and repeats the cycle again for the next rotation. You can create a path with the hose and it will follow that path until it bumps into something, dragging the hose behind it as it goes. I watched it do this for hours as a kid.
When Fritz died in the late summer of 1986, that tractor became a part of my memory of him, and I always wanted one ever since. They still manufacture versions of the tractor sprinkler, but they aren’t that old fashioned sturdy kind. They aren’t Fritz’s tractor. I had seen a few of the vintage ones over the years, but they were either too expensive or I just didn’t have the ability to get them at the time. But this spring I was at a construction material reclamation business looking for doors (that is another blog story for someday in the future), when I saw it.
This one was cast iron, just the way it should be. It was used, but not abused, and it still worked. I haven’t run any water through it yet, but the swing arms turn and all the mechanisms follow suit accordingly. And after all of these years, I finally have my tractor sprinkler.
This is the spring ’15 layout of Brayden Garden
I have given it a place in Brayden Garden. Brayden Garden is a memorial garden that I built after the death of my nephew. He was 5 years old and he died of the flu and meningitis within hours of first showing symptoms. It has become a place of grounding for me. I always find myself reflecting on the fragility of life when I am working that garden.
This cherub was donated the day after a neighbor learned of Brayden’s death.
The artifacts in the garden are growing in number. The first thing that went in was a cherub statuette that was given to me after my neighbor heard the story. I watched her heart break right in front of my eyes when I told her about Brayden. The next day, she brought me the cherub while I was out working on the garden.
The Tonka was Brayden’s
The next thing added to the garden was Brayden’s Tonka Truck. This truck was bought by my brother the day Brayden was born and it sat in the hospital room with a bouquet of flowers. The next time I saw that truck with a bunch of flowers in it was at his funeral. My brother James and his wife Melissa gave us the truck when they found out we had created the memorial garden and wanted some toy of his to go into the garden. Every year I plant flowers in it and it sits out in the garden.
Other things have been added to Brayden Garden over the few years it has been, but none with the significance of those two. Anyway, when I got this tractor, it was a bit of a memorial to Fritz, so it was obvious that it needed to be added to the garden.
Now I can guarantee you, that there is going to be a time when I put that tractor to work doing what it is supposed to do, but in the mean time it gets to sit there in Brayden Garden. And there, it will serve as one of those things that bring me back to another time and place, gives me access to memories that I otherwise might forget while at the same time helping me to stay grounded in the present.
It is a lot of work to be in a stage production. Many hours are spent reading lines, and blocking, and reading lines, and learning lines, and working lines, and listening to other people doing the same.
Amy practicing reading her last will and testament
Then, we get direction from the director and work it in as we go through the process all over again. Along the way, it stops being about the lines and starts being about the characters. There is much, more to a show than the lines. The lines tell the stories, but the characters are what the show is really about.
I can only speak for myself when I say that I have a real hard time working on the character before I have mostly memorized my lines. When I am sitting on stage trying to remember the next cue, and my lines that come after, I simply cannot focus my energy on character building.
The cast spend so many hours together that they often form great friendships.
That is where we are at right now. I might have mentioned that I was given a role as the Father (Mr. March) in Menomonie Theater Guild’s production of Little Women. My part is very small, about 38 words, and I am only on stage for about 3 minutes. That is about all I could handle at this point in time. I have only had to show up for two rehearsals, the rest of the cast has been at it for 5 weeks. This is about when people start to make the transition.
Now to be honest, they have been working on characters the whole time, but from the inside it often feels like it has been all about lines. But I have been given the opportunity to walk in fresh just as the magic begins to happen. We have a set, which is extremely helpful for setting the stage. That is after all the purpose of a set.
An awkward encounter as Meg struggles with her self.
The cast is getting to know each other, and they are starting to relate to each other as characters. Facial expressions and mannerisms are being tried on for size, then adjusted and readjusted and sometimes adjusted back to where they started.
It is always fun when we first get to try on our costumesLaurie getting his first feel for the way he will look on stage.
Today, we got to try on our costumes. This is another magical time when suddenly we start to get a vision for what we are going to look like on stage. It is great fun. Sometimes you laugh, sometimes you think you are going to cry. A tear is a wonderful form of applause.
And, while all of this is going on, the cast that is not working at that moment spends time watching and learning, and reading and practicing, and well, passing a lot of time. I have known more than just a few people who knew everyone’s lines in the entire show by the time we get to dress rehearsal.
So while we are making the theatre sausage, we find things to do. Laughing and singing, knitting and sewing, texting and blogging. Did I mention that I am writing this blog while we are running Act II. I am still starting to know the cast and crew. Having those interesting conversations that you have when you are first meeting people who by circumstances have something wonderful in common.
The costume director has a huge role in a show. They work with the director to provide the visual backdrop for the personality of the characters.
And you know that this thing is going to come together, probably at the last minute. And when the lights and sounds, makeup and sets, costumes and characters all come together, the curtain is going to come up and you and the audience will join together and step into the long wonderful history that is the theatre. And if you are anything like me, you will be captured by the experience and look forward to the next time you get a chance.
And if you are lucky, really lucky, you will get a part that works just right for you so that you can do it all again. Be careful, this can be addicting.
If we were a world of peace and love instead of war and hate, the rest would take care of itself.
There is something that I don’t understand. How can we as humans create a world that is so driven by war and hatred. Every major religion has love at the core. Every people speaks of love and peace. Yet we always find a way to turn others into enemies. It doesn’t have to be this way. All we have to do is stop. Some day, some way it has to happen. Why not now?
If you look around my garden, you are going to see re-purposed materials. Pallets and windows, old deck boards and paving stones, it is all likely to have a home in my garden eventually.
Yesterday I showed you my new cold frame made from old house windows and reused deck joists. Today I want to give you a glimpse at some of the things in my garden that are made of recycled materials.
Solar dehydrator built from salvaged shower doors, salvaged windows and pallets.
This solar dehydrator is the most sophisticated of the stuff I have built for my garden. The walls are made out of old shower doors that came out of our house. The frames on the walls are made from pallet wood as is the frame of the solar collector (the part that juts out in the front). The glass on the solar collector is from old windows, but I can’t remember where they came from. The 4x4s that hold it up were gathered from the free wood bin at the outlet store for a local hardware store. In this case I did actually buy some materials but normally I don’t. I bought the plywood and the sheet metal that is used to gather the heat in the collector. I also bought screen material to cover the racks on the inside, but the racks themselves are made out of old pallet wood.
This view shows the solar dehydrator at work
I took it even a step further, and after a couple of years of using it only as a solar dehydrator I decided I could take off the solar collector in the spring and use it as a greenhouse. I think I used it as a greenhouse for two seasons. I painted some large stones black and put them down in the bottom so they could gather heat from the sun during the day and slowly release it at night to keep it warm. It worked great.
The same structures that allow for dehydrating vegetables can be adapted to hold trays of seedlings.
On really cold nights, I had a small heater fan on a thermostat that I kept down at the bottom with the large rocks, and it would only come on when it was really starting to get chilly. It works great as both a solar dehydrator and as a greenhouse.
But I found that I needed more space in my greenhouse, so I built a greenhouse out of pallets. The greenhouse actually started out to be an ice shack, but it never made it there. I had found a very large heavy duty pallet and salvaged it with the idea of using it as the base of the ice shack. I had used re-purposed 4x4s and attached them as skids or skis to the base of the pallet. I figured this would allow me to move it around better on the ice and would give it enough substance to drag around without fear of tearing up the pallet when dragging it behind the truck. But I never got the sides on it before my back went out on Christmas Day 2013 and stopped those plans.
Before adding the plastic sheeting, you can see the simple structure made from pallet wood. the floor is also a large pallet.
It sat in my shed until that spring when I decided I needed a greenhouse more than I needed an ice shack. So I figured out how to put up walls made out of pallets, and then tried to figure out how to add a roof without making it too heavy. To that end, I found some old PVC pipes that had been part of the set of “The Jungle Book” put on by Red Cedar Youth Stage (local children’s youth theater). It seemed like a shame to see them thrown away when there was bound to be a need for them someday.
Here you can see how the pallets were used for the sides and internal shelving. The only structural elements not made of pallets are the ceiling joists which are made from re-purposed PVC pipe.
Add some shelving made out of pallets and some purchased sheet plastic and you have a greenhouse for not much more than the cost of the screws and plastic sheeting. The heat collecting mechanism in here is a combination of those black rocks from the other greenhouse, and, you guessed it, a re-purposed basketball hoop base. The base is black, and it holds about 40 gallons of water. It gathers that heat in the day and lets it out all night.
The pallets were used to create a three bin compost pile.
One of these days, I will do a story on composting. But for now I will just touch base with how you can use pallets to create a three bin compost system. In the picture below you can see how a handful of pallets can be used to manage your compost pile. The idea is that you fill up the first bin, then when it gets full, you move it into the next bin, and ultimately the last. This allows you to contain the compost, and each time you move it to the next bin you stir it up and your finished compost is in the last bin. Ultimately my compost pile way outgrew this system so it is no longer in use.
If you know me, you know that I am a form follows function kind of guy. I build something for the job it needs to do. But sometimes, the function is aesthetic. The picture below shows a trellis, no let’s call it a garden sculpture that I made out of pallets.
Behind the lattice work you can see the original pallet that serves as the frame.
In this case, I needed a structure to support the growth of my clematis. This was going to be a high visibility structure, so it needed to look like something other than a pallet. So I got creative.
Clematis enjoying the sun and shade provided by this recycled pallet.
If you look around my place, you cannot help but see things that used to be other things. I use them all over the place. I like to think that every time I reuse a pallet, or a window, or a whatever, that is one less thing to go into the landfill. It is also money I don’t have to spend, and I like that.
I hope you enjoy my ideas, and I hope they inspire you to do something with pallets. But, stay away from my pallet source, I have some more ideas for this spring.
