Downtown Seattle

as seen from 3rd Ave W and Highland Drive
10:29pm, March 27, 2005

Suburban agriculture

I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of pouring rain. Dumping rain. It has been really mild this spring, and I guess it is payback time. Nevertheless, I had made plans weeks ago to go out to the nursery with Megan and Heidi, so I got dressed and went to meet them. We headed to Flower World out in Maltby, WA, near Snohomish, basically BFE as far as I'm concerned.

Flower World is, by my estimate, roughly 100,000 square miles of nothing but plants, and we were there for a while. The order of the day, for me at least, was to get an herb garden going again. My true #1 concern was to get my hands on a shiso plant, but I guess it is still a little early, so despite also going to Swanson's Nursery in north Seattle on the way home, I returned home without one.

I did, however, get a whole bunch of herbs: thyme, lemon thyme, oregano, sage, Italian parsley, dill, chives, basil, apple mint, and orange mint.


Herbs aplenty

Last year in California, I had an herb garden, and one of the things I had wanted to try but never got around to was doing a "salad box" by filling a planter with a bunch of different salad greens. Well, sometimes dreams do come true. I got 2 red Lollo Rosa plants, a Red Giant mustard green, a "Merveille du Quatre Saisons" (French for "salad"), a Speckled Somethingorother, and six small "deer tongue lettuce" plants. And a big box.


Salad box

I didn't get home until late afternoon, and it was both sopping wet and starting to get dark outside, so I had to hope the rain would calm down enough for me to plant on Sunday without my planting soil turning into a giant mud pit.

It didn't seem too bad today, so I decided to hop to it. There is a little raised bed built inside the front fence of my house, but it had sprouted a lot of grass and weeds. I pulled out what I could, and dug the rest of it up and turned it over. Why do I have the feeling I'm going to regret not putting all of this stuff in boxes full of pristine, untarnished potting soil?

Anyway, first up to bat was the salad box. I dumped a bunch of dirt into it and tried to be gentle seating the plants, but I got dirt all over the leaves I didn't break. Well, this is why the good Lord gave us the salad spinner, I guess.


Lettuces planted and in their habitat

I planted all of the herbs except for the basil and mint in the ground. I tried to give them a good amount of space, 7-8 inches of radius around each plant. I particularly want to give the thyme a lot of room to get big.


Herbs planted

I put the mint in a separate pot I bought specifically for that purpose. This is because if you put mint in the ground, it will expand to fit whatever ground there is, usually killing everything else in the process. Heidi, who is a botanical genius, told me that unless I keep these two guys trimmed, the stronger one will eventually take over the pot. It should be all right -- I have a plan for keeping them down to size.


Apple mint and orange mint, in solitary confinement

It was still pretty wet outside and my gardening gloves are looking nastier all the time.


Gross Gardening Gloves

Megan told me she has never had much success growing basil in Seattle, so I'm going to try doing it in the greenhouse window of my kitchen. As insurance, I bought three plants. The way I see it, they will all probably die anyway, and if they are all very healthy, I'd have to have many pounds of basil before I ran out of things to do with it. Sure enough, this morning they were already looking a little wilted. I gave them some water, and I need to get them a container or two.


Basil, basil, basil

Also, violating my usual 100% utilitarian approach to gardening, I picked up a few houseplants. There is a hook in the kitchen for a hanger, so naturally I bought two hanging plants. I need to put another hook somewhere.


Plant life for the kitchen


Another hanging plant

I also got a really cool potted plant to keep in the greenhouse window called a "scarlet skullcap".


Scarlet skullcap

I have a friend coming to visit next weekend, so nothing will happen then. The house meteorologist says there is a slight chance of plaster work happening this week, but there is a laziness front off the Sound that we may have to contend with.

Dustbusters

I wrote this post last weekend and forgot to publish it. Oops.

I finally did some work on the plaster this weekend. A small amount, but I accomplished something, at least.

It sounds really trivial, but a big part of what was blocking me was dragging everything out of the living room except for the large sofa and piano, and covering those two big items with drop cloth. I finally did it, it took ten minutes just like I knew it would, and I'm suppressing my impulse to beat myself up about it some more.


Covered up

I think I have finally found a method for producing flat plaster walls. It seems like more work than should be necessary, but I don't really care at this point as long as it gets done. Basically, I smear on a bunch of coats of straight plaster until it's caked up nice and good and roughly (and I do mean roughly) thick enough to come flush with the wall. Then I plug in the power sander and grind it down to a state where it is flat with a bunch of pits. At that point I can easily fill in the little divots and finish it with the hand sander.

I tried this on the patch next to the dining room light switch, and it basically works pretty well both at getting the plaster flat and producing more dust than previously thought possible.

St. Josh loaned me this device he got when he drywalled his basement called the Aquair. It is basically an airtight bucket of water with two hoses sticking out of it. One hose goes to your vacuum, the other to a hand sander. As you sand away, the vacuum pulls the dust from the hand sander through the water, where it gets trapped and turned into sludge.

You have to use sanding screens instead of sandpaper, but that's no big deal. The real problem with this system is that I applied the plaster like I was stylishly frosting a cake, and sanding it flush by hand would take more time than just burning the place down and doing the jail time for insurance fraud. So I hooked the device up to the exhaust on my power sander, and lo and behold, it worked pretty well. It throws off more dust than the hand sander, but a manageable amount.


Power sander exhaust


Bucket o' water


Aquair exhaust


Shop vac


Bubbly goop

I sanded down three large areas of plaster, now ready to get their final fill-in and hand sanding, and while I had the sander out, I used it to rough up the paint on all of the window trim. This should give the primer better adhesion to the surface.

Mixing up that plaster is so messy and time-inefficient. I am really not looking forward to it, but there is a very large area in the dining room that needs a new top coat, on the order of 8 square feet, and I guess I'll tackle it sooner or later.

Preferably later.


Your host

Wood shop, pt. 1

The problem


Rip in half


1/4" x 2" x 2 3/4" each


Pile o' shims


America's Favorite #1 Wood Glues


Glue for the shim sandwich


Shim sandwich


Glue curing on both sides


Fully assembled


Voila!