Gardening, and Other Manual Labor

Checking in after ten days off Substack

It has been almost ten days since I last posted, my longest absence I am sure since I started this substack nearly two years ago.

In those ten days, between the garden, my contracting business and the two baseball games I played, I was busy approximately 120 hrs. Mostly it was the contracting business. But the garden is lush, taking-off now the weather is a bit more summer like. I toured a very nice garden recently, nearly as large as mine, very neat and orderly, compared to my controlled chaos.

For long time readers, these trellis beds I originally had boxed up, with sheep manure in the bottom and soil on top. That is the sheep pasture across the fence. The manure was too hot though and the beds were not so productive. Even now, a year later, some of that manure I put in compost piles and beds has not entirely broken down. Some of the peas are doing well, some aren’t. There are also climbing beans, melons and squash in this line.

Tomatoes doubled in size three days before this picture. These beds in order left to right are tomatoes, two rows of onions and one row of carrots. Last year it was tomatoes, two rows of carrots, one of onions. These beds are filled with twelve or more inches of sand, good for carrots but not so good for onions. The onions were lagging compared to onions I planted in more fertile beds, that line of darker soil is compost and woodchips with lots of worms, from a fairly hot compost pile, between the two rows of onions.

These lettuce I started indoors. The row on the right is Iceberg; I have never successfully grown iceberg before. I am curious the difference between garden grown and store-bought. Under the trellis are melons, there is some kohl rabi seed between that and a row of potatoes.

These are the first garlic I have grown. Doing very well. There are three rows of onions here as well, doing much better than the onions in the upper tomato bed.

Peas on the trellises out in the field are doing well. On the left of the trellis are radishes. We are abundant in radishes this year. I have already picked a few dozen.

The pond is looking good. Some clusters of flowers are established, I transferred some lupine from another bed, I planted some “perennial” wildflower seeds from a packet (most of which are reliable annuals), which are popping up well. All the wild water plants I planted, five different kinds, came back this year.

I put this board in the water to help birds, to facilitate their hydrating and bathing. I have seen frogs hunting bugs. Every so often I see a garter snake, mostly sun bathing but I imagine hunting as well.

This picture is all out of focus, but the row on the right is daikon radish, on the left are two kinds of baby greens, in the middle under the trellis are two different kinds of climbing beans. By the time the beans are producing I will have picked all the greens and daikon.

This is a picture of the cabbage and potato beds, before they doubled in size the three days following. The cabbage up front are twelve summer cabbages I started indoors, there are 21 smaller storage cabbages beyond that.

The garden has come together quite well this year, not having to build the garden as I did last year.

I was working on a local church last week, ten to 16hr days. Some sub-standard roofing had been done years prior, and there was considerable water damage to the walls, ceiling and windows in three different rooms. You might be able to see the rippling in the manufactured wood trim of this window.

The church has 30 parishioners, only about ten of them financially support the church. The caretaker who I walked through the building with lamented that the church is dying. I let him know I think there might be a return, people turning back to religion to deal with mounting chaos in the world. That led to a very spirited conversation which would be very familiar to readers of this substack.

They are expecting nothing more than a replacement of the existing style of trim, which is the cheapest window trim that can be purchased. On my own dime I purchased the best window trim material I could find on the shelf locally, manufactured a proper window stool, stained and sealed to closely match existing, with the intent to surprise them.

I’ve been so busy I haven’t even taken the canoe out of storage.

The best I could do in a short, limited period of time with available material, in not at all woodshop like working conditions.

I also helped an old friend who won a contract to re-roof a coal power facility in the Dakotas. I have never been in such an industrial structure (closest was a foundry I worked in in my 20’s). I didn’t take any pictures inside, but the structure of it is truly astounding. I saw infrastructure bolts with nuts the size of a human head. Circuit breakers the size of a microwave, many thousands of them stacked in banks of hundreds, extending in every direction.

The old roofing was some of the first rubber roofing, applied in 1983, patched a few hundred times. We are 350 ft in the air and it is windy this far up all the time. It is no easy thing to glue down rolls of roofing rubber in a wind gusting in excess of 50mph. The old roofing is covered in a layer of coal dust. I had no idea. It is hard to believe people still work underground with this stuff, that so many who did were dead before they were 50. The stuff gets through clothes, literally covering every inch of my body except for my feet and the top of my head (we had to wear hard hats.)

A lot of coal and a lot of water. It has been wet this spring, the opposite of last spring. All those potholls were probably wetlands that were ground up in the industrialization of farming the last hundred years. Dry in dry years, wet in wet years.

The heat generated in this facility is astounding. We are 19 stories up, most of the last two stories of the building are empty, there can’t be a lot of infrastructure there, it is too hot to work on infrastructure. There is a door to the roof that they leave open 365, it is like stepping through the vent of a blast furnace, like it could singe the skin. It seems to me they could have vents with propellers that could generate electricity just from the ambient heat. It is an unbelievable waste of heat energy. But then what do I know, I am not an engineer?

An astounding amount of water is required to cool the place, the water flowing out on the left a few thousand gallons a minute, cycling around this T, to the intake pump in that structure lower right. The other two holding ponds in the upper part of the picture are evaporation ponds. I am not sure why the three pods are three different colors. No water used in this facility can be released into the water supply or the local river, it can only be evaporated. I am not entirely sure why because I am fairly certain the two nuclear facilities on the Mississippi in Minnesota vent their coolant water more directly into the river.

Hard work, flat roof roofing, especially in a wind that can literally move you. I worked with these guys a few years when I was in my late teens and early twenties. It was easier work then. I miss working with them, but not the work.

All this manual labor, there hasn’t been a lot of time or bandwidth to focus on the cultural and political issues of the day. Manual laborers do not have much of a reputation for erudition, but then riding home with these guys each evening, it seems more a matter of priorities. They can expound at length on the finest details of diesel engines or fishing ecology and equipment to the specs and manufacturer designations of modern wood baseball bats, such that I am sometimes left feeling rather clueless. What kind of bat do you use? “I have a big bat, a medium sized bat and a little bat.” Actually, I sounded dumber than that.

Somehow though I have one more subscriber than I did ten days ago, so thank you for your patience and I hope to have some more content reasonably forthwith.