Today I took the girls with me and we picked up fresh compost from our local yard waste center. Every year they have a huge mound of the stuff and its free for the taking – black gold, as I often refer to it as – and so must others because the stuff goes rather quickly. I used it to replenish the soil that’s currently in our two box planters. I keep a mixture of compost, peat moss, and vermiculite as my soil. Got the recipe last year from here: squarefootgardening.com

They recommend a 1/3 mixture with all three components, but I’m probably heaviest on the compost, then the peat moss, and finally just a dusting of the vermiculite. That worked well for me last year. After adding everything in this evening I spent a few minutes tilling the soil and getting it nicely aerated.

I use the square foot method discussed on that site, but last year the twine that I used to create my squares disintegrated towards the end of the summer and just became a mess. I like the idea so this year I’ll try fishing line instead and see how that holds up through the season.

I also need to get a decent rabbit deterrent system in place. We have a family that lives under our shed, and the planter boxes are pretty much in the middle of their living room. It never really dawned on me last year that I should protect the plants, until one morning I discovered that the rabbits had taken a liking to the romaine and broccoli that we planted. At the time, I had just thrown together a very quick and dirty wire mesh fence around the one box and it did the trick, but this year I’d like to make something a little more sturdy and reusable.

This week’s progress on the cabinet includes trimming out the left and right sides of the carcass and creating the face frame.

For the trim on the sides, I ran my 1×2′s through the router to give them a simple Roman Ogee design and then mitered the corners.

I ended up cutting a series of half lap and cross lap joints to bring together the 1×3 and and 1×2 boards for the face frame. I’ve never attempted this before, but it seems to have come out pretty nice. The glue up is still in progress for this:

The plants seem to be coming along nicely. I’ve transplanted most of the original batch of seedlings to larger cups. A few of the tomatoes and the broccoli have gotten tall enough now that they’re falling over, so I rolled up some paper around the cups to act as support for them. This was really just a quick and dirty way of adding support, and thinking more about it, I may add just add some chicken wire instead, so that I’m not limiting the amount of light hitting the plants and the soil. I did adjust the original light fixture, positioning it directly over the plants now, and added a 2nd light above the original tray that still has some stragglers in it.

One of the things I enjoy doing every once in a while is surfing the video sharing sites for various topics, including physics. Last night I came across something I had never heard of or seen before – Oobleck – or at least Dr. Seuss’ version of a non-Newtonian fluid. What the heck am I talking about you ask?… Take a container, add about 1 cup of corn starch, and slowly mix in about half a cup of water… then have fun with this very simple example of a fluid that can change its viscosity depending on how much pressure or stress gets put on it… in other words, watch it change from a liquid to a solid and back to a liquid, right before your eyes. I played with this stuff for about an hour last night:

A few things I noticed… over time it seems as though the water that’s in the mixture evaporates – I’m only guessing this because when I played with small amounts of it for a while, it stayed solidified longer. If it starts to solidify a little too much, you can revive the mixture by adding in just a little more water. If it sits for an extended period of time (say over night or a few hours) the water tends to rise to the top, while the corn starch falls to the botttom – the mixture will come back to life however with just a few good stirs.

I want to try and figure out a way to add a vibration to this as some of the videos I came across last night showed examples of what happens to this stuff when you do exactly that. The peaks and valleys that get formed almost look surreal.

Went down to DC yesterday to take some photos of the Capitol complex for a project at work (some more photos to come). But, the highlight of the afternoon was when we met Circumcision Dude out on the West Lawn. This guy was standing out there with giant posters, advocating a ban on circumcisions in the U.S. - For about ten minutes or so he went on about the evils of circumcision, why it was ever done in the first place, how it adversely affects your sexual senses as well as your partner’s, and so on. I honestly only half paid attention to what he was saying, but after doing some searching on the web, I found there’s quite a lot of information about this topic out there. Enjoy!