How do we cool our pool?
russrimm
16 years ago
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russrimm
16 years agolast modified: 9 years agorepair_guy
16 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
How soon do we start our seeds for transplants?
Comments (12)Sheri, What sun? Sorry, just kidding. Cloudy and cold here all day and I have missed the sunlight. How are you going to use the sunlight? Will your flat of peat pellets be sitting inside the house in a sunny window? Or, are you planning on carrying the flat outside every morning and setting it in a protected yet sunny location and then carrying it back inside at night? If you are going to have them inside sitting inside a sunny window, I think you could start them now. I am assuming they will be able to get at least 8 hours of sunlight a day though. If you are going to carry them outside every morning and back in at night, I think I might wait and start them around March 1st. Remember that tiny seedlings are very vulnerable to the cold weather, though, so don't leave them outside on a day that is going to stay in the 30s. If you have a sunroom or sun porch, you probably could start them now in that location too. If you use only one seed per peat pellet for herbs and veggies, you can leave the transplant in the pellet until it is time to plant unless the cold hangs on longer than expected and the plant is outgrowing its' pellet. The drawback, though, is that there is little nutrition to speak of in that peat, so your plants might get a little hungry. You can get around that by feeding them with a liquid fertilizer like liquid fish or liquid seaweed or compost tea, diluted to be one-half as strong as the label recommends. How will you know if your plants are hungry? Their color may look a little off or they might yellow a little or their rate of growth might seem to be slower than usual. In addition, plants that are left to sit outside in the sun all day in peat pellets can dry out quite easily, especially if a brisk wind is blowing. If plants that small get too dry, they can die before you make it home from work to water them. The smaller the plant, the smaller the margin of error. It is easy to move the plants up to a larger container if the time arrives when you believe they need it. One clue will be that their roots are growing out of the bottom of the peat pellet and reaching out looking for someplace to go. Just use paper or styrofoam cups. Poke a couple of holes in the bottom for drainage. Put 2"-3" of Jiffy Mix or an organic potting soil or seed-starting mix in the bottom of the cup, assuming the cup is 6" or more inches tall. Set the peat pellet on top of that soil and then fill in around the pellet with more soil. Water to settle down the soil and then add a little more soil if needed. The cups will give your plants more room to grow roots and more soil to hold moisture as the plants grow. I like to transfer them up to larger containers as it gives the plants stronger, more vigorous root systems. The stronger and more vigorous the root systems, the better the plants will do once they are in the ground. It usually isn't absolutely required to move them up to bigger containers, though, if you don't want to do it or just don't have time to do it. The only other problem I have with peat pellets is that sometimes the plants in them seem to suffer from damping off more than plants in something like Jiffy mix. I suspect the pure peat contributes to that by holding too much water but I am not sure. If you drink chamomile tea and have chamomile handy, watering the peat pellets with a weak mixture of unsweetened chamomile tea seems to help prevent damping off. As an alternate method of raising them, you could wintersow them in flats that stay outside 24/7 in a somewhat protected location. For detailed directions on wintersowing, go to the Wintersowing Forum and read the FAQ. One advantage of wintersown tomatoes is that they seem more coldhardy. However, since they won't start growing until the daytime and nighttime temps are "just right", the plants might be smaller than you want them to be by your average last frost date. In some areas, that might not be a problem. However, in our climate, where spring weather is sometimes fleeting and we sometimes seem to go from winter to summer in the same week, smaller plants might not get large enough to flower until heat is already a problem. A lot of people who wintersow tomatoes do so in a climate that has a long, mild spring quite different from ours. Another alternative would be to put them in a coldframe like Bill P. (who posts as GoneFishing on the Texas and Tomato Forums) does. He seems to have great success with his tomato plants in a cold frame and he doesn't have to carry plants in and out morning and night. Dawn...See MoreCan we do a pool if our build has started? (a loan overage questi
Comments (3)Me? I'd wait on the pool and just put grass in the backyard for now. Live in the house for a year or two, get allmy window treatments and other decorating done and see where my budget was. Budgets for interior decorating tend to expand in the same way that house building budgets do. I wouldn't want to go overbudget to build a pool and then not have money to furnish my house properly. No matter how much I might think I would use and enjoy a pool, I would know that I would be using and enjoying the INSIDE of my house a whole lot more. Besides, many many people who install pools find that, after the first year or two, they almost never USE their pool anymore. But they still have the expense and trouble of maintaining it. I personally know at least a half dozen people who have paid to have pools REMOVED from their back yards. If after a year or two when I had all my decorating done, if my budget was healthy, I'd go ahead and put in the pool... or maybe just splurge on some really really nice landscaping....See MoreURGENT help w/ pool chemicals.. did we screw up our new pool?
Comments (18)Well you got the 1st lesson of pool ownership. 1) Becareful of the "pool store" and what they say. They don't always know what they are talking about. Buy a test kit, learn how your pool is suppose to work. Do your own testing. Post your pool chemical test results here and we can tell you what to buy. Also, if I were you, I would attack one problem at a time. One change can effect other factors without ever having to add the second chemical. And, don't worry, you have NOT ruined your pool. When you mix the chemicals together, it "can" basically make them "ineffective" at doing anything so when you end up adding what you have mixed up, the chemicals do nothing or less than what you bought them for in the first place if they react with themselves. So what you did was waste time and money and probably changed your pool chemistry less or not at all compared to if you had added them to the pool separately. The pool chemical company can sell you a bunch of chemicals to attack meaningless problems and many times they set themselves up for you creating additional problems so you can come back and buy more chemicals. You need to know whats going on and go to the store with one chemical and process in mind to buy and ignore the temptation to ask them anything. ;)...See MoreHow do we fix our soil?
Comments (19)Katie (the OP)... I really don't think thinning has much to do with root formation, only final size. I just recently ran an experiment here (for a totally different purpose) and planted nearly a dozen radishes in a single 12 oz plastic Dixie Cup (indoors under lights). They all germinated in two days an grew for 4 weeks (we just harvested them last week... mmmm, they were good). The roots all began to swell right up in two weeks and by the end of the fourth week wound up looking like dinner rolls packed into a baking pan, all bucked-up against one another and even popping out from between each other. Also I don't believe the issue is soil composition as I've grown root vegetables in heavy soil (referring to clay-ish and not nutrient density) and the roots still form... they tend to push up more out of the soil, tend towards misshapen and not get as large but they still form. So with those possibilities out of the way, that just leaves mineral deficiency or an imbalance or excess nitrogen... And the biggest clue here is that your greens (tops) grow just fine... so this tells me its not a mineral deficiency. The only thing left on the table that makes any sense is excess nitrogen levels. You don't state how you went about taking your samples or when, nor who did your testing (ex. was this a DIY kit? I'm wondering because most labs also do pH and organic matter). The nitrogen content in soil is so fleeting that if you didn't take your soil samples during the warm growing season, then the results you got likely may not really be relevant... this would be very likely if you were using fertilizer salts but also if you were growing organically as microbial activity is directly related to soil temps and moisture. I do know excess nitrogen will cause many root vegetables to push top growth rather than root formation (from first-hand experiences) and you did state how well your greens did so... What did you use for fertilizer during the growing season or how did you prepare your beds before you planted? These can all be clues to explain your lack of root formation and thus evolve into a solution. An example would be for instance say: if you mixed in (high-nitrogen) bat guano prior to planting and later side-dressed with blood meal and watered throughout the growing season with fish emulsion then the accessible nitrogen level could have been very high for the growing season but dropped off by fall with the cooling soil temps, if that's when you took your soil samples. I'm just throwing this out as an example but the only way for what you've described to be possible (based upon my own experiences anyway) seems to be an excess of nitrogen occurred during the growing season....See Morerussrimm
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