AlexH

On August 13th, we got the garden planted at Tracy’s parents’ house.  It’s a bigger plot than I had at the house in Vancouver, so I’m looking forward to seeing what I can do with it.  It’s a mix of cooler weather crops like lettuce, spinach, and peas.  I also planted beans but that is mostly an experiment.  I don’t expect them to last into the winter since they don’t appreciate the cold weather, and I can’t put them under a coldframe.  They may not even produce anything that I can harvest, but I hope they will fix some nitrogen in the soil.
Once again I make the mistake of planting all of the onions at the same time, so I’m going to have a lot of green onions coming soon.

Many of the beets, arugula, and mustard are ready to harvest now as microgreens.  Interesting that it only takes about 3 weeks.  I did some thinning, but they just went in the compost pile rather than being eaten.

I should note that the carrots, spinach, and lettuce have not progressed as much.  Either old seeds, or incorrect conditions for them.  I thought that the weather conditions would be ideal right now, so I wonder if it is related to the soil.

One concern that I have is slugs.  Copper tape is so expensive, but I think I will be using that once the rain starts for the fall.

I’d estimate that 8 square feet in 4 weeks makes a salad.   4*7*8 = 224 sq ft to eat a salad every day, but it would require replanting the squares every day.  It would be nice though, radish greens, beet greens, arugula, and mustard.  Tough on the wallet though, planting 256 seeds every day.  When I have more space, I’m going to practice collecting seeds, but for now, I don’t have the space or the willpower to let things go to seed, when I could be harvesting them.  Especially for a biennial like beets.

My dad and I made another boat trip this weekend.  This time from Steveston to Nelson Island.  We managed 6.5 knots at the start of the trip, going into some fairly rough weather.  It always seems to swell at the Sandheads, and this time was no exception.  We pounded into the waves until we approached Merry Island.  After that we made about 9.5 knots for the rest of the trip.

10:15-17:05, or about 7 hours.
On the way up, we heard a boat called Saludos hailing someone else.  My parents owned a sailboat called Saludos when I was just a baby, so we tried to hail him on the VHF, but no luck.  We’ll never know if it was the same one.

I was up at my parents’ cabin on the Sunshine Coast for the BC day long weekend, and had a great time.  My cousin came up with her family the following weekend and discovered a bat in the bedroom that I was sleeping in.  Unfortunately they didn’t capture it, so now I’m considered to be possible exposed to rabies.  The numbers I heard were 10% of the bats in BC have rabies.

Since rabies is an almost always fatal disease (1 person has survived it without having severe brain damage, ever!), Tracy and I were determined to require the immunoglobulin and vaccine.

I was initially freaking out because I heard that the rabies treatment was quite painful, and required injections to the abdomen.  Thanks to modern medicine, I only need injections in the arm and butt.  I’ve since had the ones in the rear end, and my first in the arm, and will have the remaining 4 shots in the arm.  Next one is this afternoon.

Injections are never fun but it’s better than dieing a particularly nasty death.

Tracy went by to pick up mail from our old house, and reports that the tomatoes are doing great! They are getting watered and the kids upstairs are having fun picking them.  Makes me feel better after abandoning them in July.

Tracy and I headed up to Kelowna for the weekend to attend Nick and Jenn’s wedding.  It was a great weekend and their ceremony and reception were held at a resort right on the lake, it was beautiful up there.

Jenn asked us to help her with a wedding guestbook since Tracy has the scrapbooking and photography skills, and I’ve got the computer skills.

We took pictures of the guests as they arrived for the ceremony, and then between the ceremony and the reception we printed the pictures on our Epson PictureMate (v1).  There was a brief panic when the colours in the printer were off, but then we realized that we had a glossy ink pack and matte paper.  After switching the cartridges, all was well.

There were two things we could have done better.  First would be to use a Rev 2 PictureMate because apparently they print much faster. The other would have been to plug the SD card directly into the printer instead of using the USB connection, which was slower and drained the camera battery.

Other than that, it worked out great, and Jenn and Nick have a unique guestbook to remember their wedding with.

I’ve started a website for local Miata enthusiasts: Vancouver Miatas.

I used Joomla to run it, and I was amazed at how easy it is to set up a website.  There are a ton of plug-ins (called components, modules, or mambots depending on what they do) available to do whatever you want.  Events calendars, galleries, classifieds, or anything else you want in a website.  Sometimes the quality isn’t that great but there are a lot of nice packages out there.  You just need to try them out.

LOL, blogs are made for people like Jeremy.

On the weekend we had a lot of rain during the night.  14mm according to Environment Canada, who have an excellent weather archive.  There aren’t many choices for cities (Vancouver being the closest to Port Moody) but it gives a rough idea.  Most of my plants loved it, but there were a lot of almost ripe cherry tomatoes that split.  I picked them yesterday, and they were still good, but I worry about the rest of the tomatoes being spoiled.  The Minibel heirloom was partially undercover and it seems to be ok.  Fingers crossed.