Garden Activity Report – 6 Feb 2010

The frustrating cycle of me being away from home during prime gardening time has started again.  I’m a little late on some things and a little early on some things, but I wanted to get some cool weather vegetables in the ground.  We had a single onion from last summer that was still hanging in the garage in some pantyhose.  It had sprouted lots of shoots and was attempting to grow.  I separated the individual plants and put them in the soil.  I’m not sure they will live, they were pretty weak looking.  I also had lots of other onions growing from last year’s crop that I accidentally didn’t completely harvest.  So I now have over 30 onion plants growing and I didn’t pay a dime for them!  I also planted a row of garlic.  (I should have planted that months ago)

I also planted 2 variates of spinach, 2 variates of leaf lettuce, and 4 variates of carrots.  It is still very cold and pretty wet, so I hope these actually germinate.  We will see.

All of the spinach and broccoli that has been growing over the winter has survived the cold weather.  I was very surprised by this.  There was even a few heads of lettuce in the bed next to the garage that survived.  This means this area doesn’t get as cold as the other beds, so I should be able to grow lots of things throughout the winter in that location.

Earlier this week I brought home 1 1/2 cubic yards of ‘pro-mix’ from Living Earth.  It looks like pretty good soil, but it has rocks in it.  I filled up my new raised bed with this soil, and it is ready to plant my asparagus crowns when they come in.  My worms are doing good too.  I was wondering if they would survive the winter, and it looks like they did just fine.

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Partitioning a USB Drive

While I was away on business last month, I had two different occasions where I needed to boot a computer with an alternate OS to repair something that wasn’t right.  I used Trinity Rescue Kit for both of these tasks (virus removal and system password reset).  I wound up having to burn a CD, but I should have been able to create a bootable USB stick to do the same thing.  Turns out I just missed a step in creating the bootable USB, but it made me think about why I never see USB drives partitioned out like regular hard drives.  Turns out it is because of a limitation within the Windows OS; it only recognizes the first partition on a USB drive.

I tried to reformat and partition the drive from my work computer, but I wasn’t able to do anything useful with from the standard Windows disk manager.  A little research gave me some ideas, but almost everything involved buying third-party proprietary disk management software to get the job done.

When I came home, I plugged the drive into my home computer, which is running Linux.  I clicked on the partition manager, selected the USB drive, and bam!, everything I wanted to do was right there.  Linux handles resizing, adding new partitions, formating, and setting the boot flag all from the native disk tool without any glitches.  So I made a little partition dedicated for my rescue kit, and will use the main partition for normal stuff.

Interesting that the partitions do show up in Windows disk manager, but only the first partition is usable.

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Don’t Turn Away for a Minute!

Bryson was looking for a toy that we ‘put up for awhile’.  It looked like he was well on his way to emptying out every possible toy bin in the house!

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Asparagus Raised Bed

I have 20 asparagus plants on order and I’m expecting them to arrive in a few weeks.  Asparagus is one of the plants that loses most of its taste within a day of picking, so I’m excited to taste it fresh.  It will take a few years before the plants start producing though, but I don’t want to waste another season.

I decided (against my wife’s wishes) to add a new raised bed on the north side of our driveway.  This area gets full sun, and is a big waste of land, just growing grass.  I’d like to plant a bunch of fruit trees in the area, but the electricity, gas, phone, and cable all run through that area.  I decided to use standard 2×12 lumber instead of cedar or pressure treated.  I’ll coat the inside with linseed oil and paint the outside surface.  I’ll be curious to know how long the wood will last.  This will give me 48 more square foot of raised bed area.

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WTF Pictures

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