Hoo-ston, we have a problem

G'day all!

Long time no blog. Not that there has not been interesting house stuff to blog, just it hasn't been done.

At the moment we are trying to set up our grey water scheme. Grey water is the stuff from the shower, bath and laundry that normally goes down the sewer or septic. In Victoria (Australia, not Canada and not anywhere else either and certain not good old Queen Vic herself) it is legal to divert greywater onto the garden. So we are. It will mean that we can set up our little apple orchard and never have to worry about it having too little water again.

The plan was to dig an increasingly deep trench in the back yard - there is a wee slope towards the front yard so to get the water to flow "uphill" we would need to dig the trench deeper and deeper (so it actually flowed down).

So I set up a line to dig along. Nathan loosened the soil up some with the mattock and I started digging a trench.

Along the way I discovered this:

That is a root of the camphor laurel that appears to be bigger around than my thigh. I dug down about 20cm around it and never found the bottom of the root. It is slap bang in the path of the trench.

Of course trenches can go around roots but I also noticed that the camphor laurel is shooting again, so we have to pour more woody weed killer into it. This means there is very little point planting an apple orchard near it.

So I made an executive decision to point the grey water out the front. The front is downhill. I still have to make a trench but it is easier to deal with and does not need to be so deep. The apples will live quite happily in the front yard. They are only bubby apples on dwarfing rootstock.

The trench went in fine and the water even runs through it:


Then I started digging the holes for the apple trees. a) clay. b) see below:


A copper pipe. Right under where I want to plant the trees. Hoo-ston, we have a problem!

anon!

PS - a hint of some action inside the house....

Shade rollers

On the weekend we had a nasty storm blow in and flop the shadecloth around on the greenhouse. In the past I've just sown a plank into the bottom of the shadecloth and 'rolled' that up when I want it open. My new greenhouse has a steeper pitch (5/12 in fact) to match the house and the plank doesn't stay where it should be when we get 100km/hr winds. I've thus been trying to devise a robust way to fix the shadecloth in any position. Shade on the outside is better in summer because being in free air allows the cloth to air cool.

Ideally the shade cloth would be supported a few cms off the polycarbonate roof to reduce scratching, heat stress and provide an extra air gap for insulation. A good design would also be able to be automated in the future.

My current design uses the standard roll up blinds trick of a loop along the outside curve, around the roll and back up to the gable. This will stop the shade cloth from rolling down, but it doesn't stop things flailing about in the wind. So we add another string that winds up inside the roll and drops down to the ground.

We could support the shade cloth on a row of tensioned wires, though I probably won't bother.

A nice property of this design is that the total string required is almost constant, so we can simply return the string back from the down string to the up string. We need to add a bit of tension to the string to stop flapping. I prefer gravity tensioning as it is less prone to oscilations, so I propose adding a few kg to a roller hanging off the return line. To automate this design we would just need a motor driving the return line.

May in the garden

G'day all!

Time for some pictures of flowers in May. May is Spring for many of you but here May is getting into the coldest part of the year. It's late autumn or early winter. And we are definately working on the wintry weather!

Many of the roses are still happily growing and flowering. The English roses and floribundas are going great guns - they obviously reckon 15 degree maximums are beaut. Some of the old garden roses have shut down for witner - they are not doing anythign! Because we aren't getting frosts, or near frosts (we would expect 3 or 4 in May) the aphids are still going strong. Grr!

This little rose grows on the back fence. It is an old fashioned miniature climber. A possum neatly trims off the top of its growth, so it stays just below fence height.




These two roses were here when we got here. They need some looking after - once winter really kicks in I'll clean them up a lot.


Sophie's rose, an Austin rose, has flowered almost constantly since we planted her over two months ago. I think this is Sophie's rose - might be another one but I don't think so....


One of the fuschias is going nuts (sorry about the blurry photo).

The vegie patch has gone from looking like this:

to this in about three weeks:

Yes the plants are too close cos I am used to losing up to half the seedlings, only this time around there were no cutworms or snails to eat half the danged things. I've got multicoloured silverbeet (love the stem colours! Love them!), beetroot, golden podded peas, honeypod peas, crimson flowered broad beans (why yes I hate broad beans but someone will like them!), onions (two types), heritage multicoloured carrots, spinach and some seeds planted in there too that I can't remember. LOL.

It has an extra patch by it, which I dug out on my father's death day anniversary:

This patch has leeks, carefully dug up by Nutmeg cos this is the BEST cat toilet spot EVER (except for the area that I dug up to plant daffodils in in the front yard...), sad little cauliflowers (I forgot about them and then refound them and discovered that they are actually ginormous ones, not the mini ones I thought I had bought), two punnets of chinese cabbages, more seeds of some mustardy family stuff (why no I didn't label them! I figured I would work out what they are when they have more than their little cotyledons).

Now before I forget about the leeks, here is a picture of the punnet of leeks I bought. Sweet innocent baby leeks eh?

Well if I plant out a punnet of leeks with each little bubby leek 5cm from the next bubby leek, I end up with about 6 metres of leeks. That is a LOT of leeks! But alas! (hooray?) between Nutmeg digging the things up (despite the wire) and the blackbirds digging up one end (before the wire was put down) I only have about 3/4 of those I planted out originally.


No autumn would be complete without a mushroom. I wonder if one of my friends will ask me for it cos I have inadvertantly taken a pic of a very special sort of mushroom (I found those very special mushies up in a national park).


Next door's tree dahlia has started flowering this week - they certainly grow fast! The rest of the dahlias in the area are long gone.


The goldrush zucchini is still producing one or two zucchini a week. The old foliage is looking very tatty now. It won't be long for this world - a good frost or two and it is gone! I'd best go out and hand pollinate any flowers it has today.


Even the hibiscus is still flowering, though the flowers are a little smaller now.

There's plenty of other plants still flowering - I haven't even started on the heathland plants! - but that is enough for one post.

anon!

By popular request...

G'day all!

I give you pictures of our house, taken on Anzac Day (April 25) this year. Pics are warts and all.


The north face (ie the sunny side down under), facing the street. Lots of junk about, a partially constructed greenhouse, some seedling benches, a skyrocket whose days are numbered....


The west wall - faces the hottest sun and gets some of the worst winter winds. Complete with nifty pressure valve stuff and solenoids for the watering system and toot.


The south wall, with kitchen and bathroom windows, gets the worst winter weather (ie driving rain, hail, lashing winds). Complete with 1000L watertank, pump and various bits of junk. That canopy over the door is going to go - it makes the place look like a mobile home.


The garden by the front gate, complete with recently planted violas and pansies.

We have to do an update on the greenhouse in progress, though we might leave it until more is done so you can see obvious progress. We also got a new rain water tank on Monday, only to get it into place, we'll have to pull a bit of the garage roof off! Ooops!

Just to show you Lynne is not a complete slouch in the garden, here she is attacking an agapanthus with the mattock. Mattock 1, agapanthus nil. Lynne's back fine, but swinging a mattock is a surprisingly good way to develop lats (the muscles underneath the shoulders that help give a body builder wide shoulders).



Though the agapanthus is still there, as you can sorta see in this pic of Cheshire sniffing the grapevine that has snuck through the fence from next door.

Of course Cheshire has to sniff the vine - after all things all around it have moved! Must sniff things when they move even though they have been sniffed 10,000 times in their old spot!

OK, more pics anon!

Blobs!

G'day all!

Plenty happening at the Modest Manor at the moment.

Nathan has to blog all about his rainwater tank and the greenhouse at last in real progress.

But I have to show off this:

Yep, that is one of the walls of the fibre room, with wet smears from being washed with sugar soap and two sets of green blocks from me testing colours direct on the wall. I had been told to paint board with the colours but I couldn't get a real sense of how they worked so I painted blocks on the wall.

As it turned out, I didn't like any of the colours in particular. I did like the idea of having blocks of colour on the wall, so I bought more sample pots. I think I have 8 or 9 now.

I taped up part of the wall with not very straight lines, and discovered that I should've bought the ultra delicate wall masking tape, not the delicate stuff when i repositioned a line and took a chunk of paint off. I also discovered that the previous paint job was peachy pink. I have a feeling that the previous owner had moved back home to help his Mum out as she finished her twilight years, and he painted what was his study a more masculine beige.

Then throwing caution to the wind, I started randomly applying blobs of colour to the walls with a little roller. This is what happens when you blob it on:

Not very even and it doesn't line up all over the place, somewhat deliberately. Next I want to see if I can make some sort of tree trunk like lines, but that means buying some darker brown. Also I can start using the smaller roller, the 10cm one, and overpainting blobs and layering it up some - if I am lucky, it will look like an abstract forest. If I am not lucky, it will look like some gooberhead attacked the wall with lots of green blocks and not much skill.... Still if worst comes to worst, I now know which green I like best - leaf green (I think but am not sure that it is the green that is top left in the pic). I can paint the whole wall that colour. Plus we are still considering knocking that wall out to make a larger living/dining sorta area.

I blame Purplexity for making me finally start painting. She painted most of her place with her DH's help before she moved in. We've been here for four months and have only just started. But we are looking at kitchen places and bathroom places cos we need some renovations happening!

Soon we will show some pics of the garden and then hopefully the greenhouse being built. It is started but has a ways to go yet...

anon!

The greenhouse project

It's been rather quiet on the modest manor blog, but that doesn't mean nothing has been happening. Indeed it means that so much has been happening that we haven't had time to write anything. At our previous (rental) house we built a lovely greenhouse against the north wall of the house, we also had a window conveniently located so that we could let air in from the greenhouse into the main house. This worked so well for heating the house in winter that we've decided to build a greenhouse with this goal specifically in mind.

The plan calls for two 3.6m x 2.5m 'rooms. You enter from the west (where the current front path is). The west half will be desert, kept fairly dry, with a table and chairs. The west half has a door into the east half, which will be tropical, with a pond. Summer cooling is performed by drawing air through an inlet covered in a dense tomato or similar vine.

I'm using 1x3 hardwood flat walled frame, and twin-wall poly
as per this sketch:

I resketched this in QCad, which alerted me to a few errors in my floorplan.

There are a number of reasons for going this way:

• The space we have is fairly limited.
• We want multiple use for the space.
• A smaller greenhouse is easier to maintain.
• A smaller greenhouse is cheaper to build,
  
• and if it doesn't work properly, cheaper to rebuild.
  

The south wall will be a solar heater for the house, with fin tube at the top to preheat water for domestic hotwater. Similarly the top of the greenhouse will have a fin tube to heat the fish pond water and keep the greenhouse cool without venting on sunny winter days. The south wall will
be insulated to R1, the collector will be shaded mid-summer.

The south bench has a full length pond made from like plywood and EPDM pond liner for fish and water supply.



There is a trickle water fall with ferns on the west wall of the tropical house. which recirculates into the pond.

Yesterday and today Dad and I put together the water storage/fish tank. The tank itself weighs at least 100kg. I did the engineering calculations for the tank, here are some stats:

dimensions: 3.6m long x 0.9m wide x 1.2m tall, buried in the ground to be 0.8m above greenhouse floor level.
capacity: 3.5kL. Of course we had 30mm of rain the day before I got the tank assembled, but people assure me that it will rain again some day.
average pressure on long walls: 6kPa, i.e. 600kg per metre of tank. This means that the sides will have a sheer force of 2.6 tonnes. If the side walls weren't strengthened with steel straps the wood would bow out nearly 30cm in the middle. The bolts are rated to a shear strength of 12 tonne, the steel strapping 1.2tonne.

With any luck the whole thing will stay together when full. (It's a little scary, but I'm fairly confident of my calculations, if not my construction techniques)

We filled the tank with something like 500L to see if the liner would straighten out. It did, but it drifted off square which means I'll probably have to get into the tank and pull it square again, or alternatively, pump the water back into the rainwater tank it came from.

Paint blobs

G'day all!

I've been starting to get antsy about painting some walls around here. Purplexity has been painting the walls of her new place and I am like I WANT TO PAINT! I want to put my mark on the inside of this house! (Rather than simply wiping off the marks the previous inhabitants left... Mrs M I think used the walls for navigation and she was either minute or had bad osteoporosis ;-)

So two days ago, nathan and I rode up to Bunnings (like rode up on our pushbikes) and I eyeballed the paints and we brought home some sample pots in green. Bright cheerful green.

I decided that the fibre room is first under the hammer, or at least the paint brush and roller. I painted up some board as the paintshop lady suggested so we could get some idea of how the colours looked. I didn't like one of the greens - too yellow I thought as I painted it. One green is the same tonings but slightly darker than the kitchen. The other is obviously green.

The fibre room is currently these colours:

Do they look like me? A darker beige on the wall with the window, lighter beige all round, white cornices and a pale sage green roof. Hmm...

Then I painted some rough squares of colour on the walls in different places in each of the three greens.

Suddenly the green that was too yellow was a winner! (it's the middle one.) But an even bigger winner was just looking at the wall and thinking "I really like having the colour blocks on the beige."

So my current plan is to get some more sample pots in some different greens, lighter and darker shades, not too much darker, and get a little roller and just paint squares on the walls! I have thought about masking taping the wall up so that we have the beige background with happy greens on it but I don't want it too sqaure and geometric.

It will be different! And if it doesn't work, we'll just paint the whole lot green.

:-)

There's something in our garden

G'day all!

We made actual garage progress yesterday! Yep, I found the rendering manual. I had tidied it cos we had visitors and it ended up in a box. So we played.

The hardest part is getting the undercoating rendering stuff the right consistency. Too wet and it runs and drips off the wall. Too dry and it just peels off. Around the right level of goop, it sticks and smooths over the polystyrene beautifully. The best consistency is like a thick pancake batter, or a runnyish cake batter.

So we made a little progress:

This took us about an hour and a half to do from mixing the rendering stuff to pressing on the fibreglass matting, and we got much faster as we worked out what consistency the render should be.

Having managed to get rendering goop all over us (it burns sensitive skin a little but hands seem immune to its effects), we sat down for afternoon tea. Nathan was looking at his plants, as always, when he spotted something.

OH MY WORD! ORCHIDS!


We have Pterostylis growing in our back yard, right where we were going to put the vegie patch. The vegie patch is moving to the other side of the yard now :-) We've been told that the soil was trucked in from somewhere else, but I am starting to wonder about that now. We know there are leek orchids out the front yard and sundews, and Pterostylis in the back yard. Remember this house has been here for nearly 50 years. That just seems gobsmacking that the things survived or that if they came from elsewhere the rest of the soil conditions are ok for them. None of the orchids are particularly exciting but they are orchids and they are in a part of suburbia that has been here for almost 50 years. That to me (and Nathan) is really exciting.

*BOUNCE*

anon!

Passive auto-switchover for rainwater tanks

You have a rainwater tank and a nice pressure activated pump. When you turn on a tap, the pump turns on. When the pressure at the pump reaches a set top point, the pump switches off.

The problem: when the tank runs dry you'd like to use the town water.

Known existing solutions:

• Put a ball valve in the bottom of the tank.
• Use a float switch to turn on a solenoid to stop the tank running dry.
• Refill the tank with a hose.
• Have a stop-cock to connect the mains into the high pressure side
• Use a float switch to turn on a solenoid to connect the mains to the high pressure side.
  

The solutions are all commonly used, and I know an instance of each. They are all wrong for one reason or other:

• The pump still has to run even though town water is already available at a high pressure.
• Some kind of manual operation needs to happen to switch over or to top up. People forget and tanks over fill or valves get left on, wasting town water when pump water is available.
• Power has to be available for the system to work.

I have implemented a cheap and robust alternative as proposed in ATA's Renew (forgot which one). The idea is to use a device called a 'pressure reducing valve' to provide water at a pressure just lower than the pump switch on pressure, so that if the pump is inactive the town water is available. The renew design called for a variable pressure reducing valve, at a cost of $300 wholesale. And they don't make them go low enough for my little rivaflow irrigation pump. This design uses a $6 plastic version with a fixed rating of 100kPa.

Thus, the pump can simply be switched off when the tank runs dry. We can do this using a float switch and a relay (the pressure switch itself may have a relay you can subvert).

After ringing a number of plumbing supplies and being told that my idea wouldn't work (when it is plainly clear that it must) and anyway, you can't get pressure valves like that, I found a suitable pressure reducing valve at the local big box hardware store. The device is actually designed for very low pressure irrigation systems, but it is well made with a thick HDPE case, solid looking white nylon valve assembly and a heavy gauge membrane. The high side is rated to 3MPa.

(insert photo here)

The final layout of my rainwater irrigation system is:



A nice additional feature is that if your water demand exceeds the pump capacity the mains kicks in seamlessly (within the inertia of the pressure reducing valve and water in the pipe etc). It is good to have the valve as close as possible to the manifold as a result.

In which we decide to finish the garage

G'day all!

We had big plans for this weekend. I promised to help Nathan with the garage. We need to get the last of the foam onto the back corner so that we can start rendering and stuff.

So I wandered around, doing my own thing, whilst Nathan did his own thing - trying to stop a leak in the toilet filling pipe (note he forgot to tell me that he hadn't fixed it and had not reconnected the pipe...until after I discovered there was no water in the cistern....).

Then I came home. Within half an hour, the sky turned dark grey and the trees bent under the gale-force wind:


and suddenly it was persisting down! The rain was coming in sideways:


I discovered that the front porch is not water-tight - there is a gap between the house guttering and the laserlight.

Within 15 minutes, we had had at least 7mm of rain (someone had not emptied the rain gauge for a couple of weeks), but more like 10-15 cos the garden started looking a bit flooded.

Anyway, after an hour it seemed ok to go out again. The garden was damp but not flooded - it seems to soak up any moisture it gets. Our previous place would've been under water. The radar map looked like this:

(image copyright BoM.gov.au) The rain band was to the north of us. We only needed to go a kilometre north of where we live and a couple of ks west.

Well.... let's just cut it short. (most pics not clickable)

The normally placid drain by Springvale Road at Spaghetti Junction:


The corner I wanted to turn left at.


This brave car (a year old Mazda 6) took on the flood waters of unknown depth at the corner where I wanted to turn left. Nathan said ah just follow them. Go on! It is OK!:


I am very glad that I didn't follow it. a) the water was rising as we sat waiting for the lights to change, and b) this:

Oh dear!

The local drain/creek - the concrete base is about a metre under water here:


The "retarding basin"

(if you look at the big image, you might just be able to see some spots on the water - these are native ducks. Normally they swim really close to the edge of the weir, but not this time!)

The sun starts breaking out:


The radar map when we got home, safe and sound thanks to my lovely little car:


And the rain gauge - emptied before we went out:


So much for getting that last lot of foam on the back corner of the garage! Maybe it is not DH's brother who is the jinx!

Nathan vs Garden round 2

On Sunday Nathan took on the neighbours-be-gone on the other side of the path form our new garden bed. The plants did provide a privacy screen but let's face it - they are pittosporums growing where we want to put the roses. Roses vs pittosporums. Roses 1: pittosporums nil.

So Nathan attacked the neighbours-be-gone with crow bar and mattock. Here's the photo story of his mighty battle with one of three plants:

Note the technique with the mattock.


Sometimes brute force can help

(though the mattock works better)

Going

Going

GONE!

And turned to mulch.


After hard work, a man deserves a long cold beer


ahhhhh!



Now we have a mulched bed awaiting some rain and placement of roses! Hooray!


Nathan 2: Garden nil! See the difference?


anon!