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Post by philagardener on Sept 3, 2017 6:45:33 GMT -5
40' wide grid roads sound like fire breaks, maybe easier to plow in the winter too?
I'd be interested in hearing more about using pallets. What would you do differently now?
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Post by steev on Sept 3, 2017 18:37:52 GMT -5
I'm struck by the distance between -45C and my own mid-20sF environment; damn; I love this forum! So much to learn from people, not papers.
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Post by prairiegardens on Sept 4, 2017 4:08:09 GMT -5
40' wide grid roads sound like fire breaks, maybe easier to plow in the winter too? I'd be interested in hearing more about using pallets. What would you do differently now? A few things, actually. I used shingle pallets because the stringers are slightly smaller, 2x3.5? Instead of a full 2x4, so are slightly lighter in spite of also being larger, thinking they'd be easier for me to handle, since I was collecting and (mostly) unloading them. Although that's true, that ended up being a nuisance on the roof, leaving an awkward gap to be fitted. I should have made the roof full pallet sized length with a longer gable overhang instead of having to work from both ends into the middle for strength. So those 6 pallets, 3 on each side, all had to be semi constructed to fit, a matter of bad planning. Lighter or or not I think next time I'd use the 40x48 pallets, they're heavier but it's easier to access good ones, and the dimensions easier to work with than 43.5 x57.5 shingle pallets. I did use them for the floor. One thing that I had not expected was that even if the width and length are consistent, the depth varies depending on the thickness of the slats, so I now have several stacks of orphan pallets. They will be used as fencing eventually, most of them are close enough they will appear identical for that purpose. Or maybe use those ones for a winter chicken house.... The main hold up though, was I got the wrong sort of ties for the rafters. They would have been perfect for a " normal" roof, but were a royal pain for this one because the pallets ran up beside and were screwed to each rafter. So they had to notch each of the roof pallets at the top of the wall to make room for the wings on the ties. I was going to change them but the guys said no, they'd deal with it, and they did, but it took forever. So probably better just to go with traditional birds mouth cuts to fit, there isn't a hurricane tie out there to fit 3 2x4s side by side, which is approximately what the rafters ended up being. One thing I learned was no matter how I figured it out I needed way more pallets than I thought. Still not sure where they all went although some of them ended up on the orphan piles. Sometimes even the ones stamped with dimensions are surprisingly an inch or more out. Or they look the same in a random pile and it's only when they are fitted together it's obvious they're different. |
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Post by RpR on Sept 6, 2017 20:48:32 GMT -5
Black locust is fence post material.... Too good to burn.... Re beating the box elder.... Both are supposed to sucker... Although I've never seen box elder to colonize the way that robinia does. Re the tent caterpillars... At my house, I had a good sized structure going on the elderberry bush.... Until the berries ripened... Songbirds picked the berries and the caterpillars at the same time.... I grow the elderberries for the songbirds.... Reckon The caterpillars make good food for them too. I grew up with Box Elders on my dad's lawn, and a lot of others. ALL suckered EXCEPT for one on our lawn which had a branchless trunk up to about thirty feet off of the ground. The sucker leaned heavily but had a trunk at least three feet in diameter all the way up. I was in my twenties before a wind storm tipped it over but it never showed signs of age and it was a big tree when I was born. Fortunately they were putting in curb and gutter by our place when it fell and the contractor hauled away the tree for free. |
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Post by prairiegardens on Sept 13, 2017 16:40:56 GMT -5
Well, the nearest box elder from my place is at least two blocks away and they turn up around the place and in the garden every year. On the other hand one has shown up on the other side from and outside of one of the sandpits I'm trying to fill in and that one definitely could be a sucker although none of them are very tall, less than a foot I'd say. They are growing much more slowly and look fairly beat up so going to give them some fireplace ash and see if that makes them any happier. Horsetail is back with a vengeance, although where I scattered a bunch of lime it's mostly gone. So that's the plan now...going to be a battle though there are acres of it AND it's shown up in huge clumps on the grid roads.
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Post by prairiegardens on Sept 26, 2017 12:28:23 GMT -5
This summer I learned that horsetail tea is supposedly useful for a number of things including healthier hair and nails. So have gathered some up and now waiting for the courage to try it.  |
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