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kathy_t
7 years ago
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friedag
7 years agolast modified: 7 years agofriedag
7 years agolast modified: 7 years agoRelated Discussions
Indexing valves, toggle valves...
Comments (9)No, I don't do things the way everyone esle does. Everyone else buries their waterlines below the frost line. I run mine flush into the sod. This is easy to install, easy to modify, easy to fix. Most other people use PVC pipe. After looking at the environomental impact of PVC, I avoid it whenever possible. I use black poly pipe and by preference glass filled nylon joints. Most other nurseries keep bare earth. I keep mowed pasture. I use almost no herbicide, and zero pesticide, depending on the birds and predatory bugs to work for me. Most other nurseries put all of each kind of egg in one basket. E.g. a big one to the south of me has a quarter section of just shubert chokecherries. I try to have no more than a few hundred of anything together. This means that a bunch of mice who develop a taste for scots pine bark stop at the blue spruce boundary. As far as I know I'm the only guy in Alberta to raise trees entirely in containers. Means I can put a MUCH larger tree in a pot than the guys with field trees. (A 5 foot larch does quite well in a #2 pot.) I overwinter my pots above ground -- results are species dependent. Spruce do well if packed close together, willows are fine. White pine is unhappy. I'm moving to Pot in Pail. Rather than buy a socket pot -- with holes that line up with the liner pot, I salvage pails from the dump, clean them, and put holes in them that DONT line ukp with the liner pot. A #5 trade pot fits nicely inside. It takes me about 30 seconds each per pot to remove the lid, clean it, drill holes in it. So with farting around call it 30 pails an hour. Given that good #7 pots cost several dollars each this is good return on my time. (Right now the biggest issue is finding the pails) Rather than spend 30K per acre, putting in fancy drainage I chose a patch of land that has very sandy subsoil. A hole filled with water drains in 10 minutes. I mark the hole locations with survey paint, and hire a high school kid to auger holes in. He can set about 25 pails per hour. Works out to about 50 cents. So a row of 100 pots costs me 50 bucks of hired kid, 3 hours wear on my groundhog, 2 hours of my time processing the pots (also kid labour possible) and the time to scrounge 100 pails (typically an afternoon.) Every one else runs their greenhouse north-south. I plan to make mine east-west. Everyone else makes a separate head house. I plan to put an insulated wall 1/3 of the width from the north side. Paint it white. In spring here the sun is fairly low. (Its 36 degrees up at noon on spring solstice) So bedding plants tend to lean to the south. With a white north wall, I should be able to even out the illumination considerably, at the cost of 1/3 of the floor space. Insulate the north side too. Gives me a triangular space 1/3 W by L with a height ranging from 12 feet at the wall down to the bottom of the greenhouse wall. This space will be mostly filled with water barrels -- about 180 for a 60 x 30 house. 3 per foot of length The exhaust fans will pull air from the peak and run through the barrels, and exit the bottom of the triangular space. At night, the air goes back to the green house under the benches. I figure I can heat a greenhouse down to about -15 C in March for the price of running fans. Math: A double poly greenhouse averages R1 per square foot of floor space. If I want to maintain 50 F temps inside, I have roughly a 50 degree differential. So a 1 foot slice of greenhouse 20 feet wide has 20 square feet of floor space, which will take 20*50 = 1000 BTU/hour to heat. Or about 12000 btu for a night. For the sake of making numbers simple, increase that to 15000 3 barrels of water is 1500 lbs of water. So I have to raise the temp of the water by 10 F to have enough heat. Air has about the 40% thermal energy as water -- per pound. Air at the top of the peak is typically 20-30 degrees warmer than the ground level when the air doesn't circulate Daytime green house temps run about 70-75, so peak temps are about 100. To get 15000 btu, assuming only 30% efficiency in heating the barrels, I have to move 40000 lbs of 100 degree air to get a 10 degree rise. Air is about an ounce per cubic foot, so 40,000 lbs of air is about 640,000 cubic feet. At 8000 cfm that's about 80 minutes. Given that the bulk of the heating will happen in 3-5 hours in mid day, this is a comfortable margin....See More107 highs with heat index of 114 predicted for today
Comments (10)Hmm. I must have forgotten, for it seems like we have had a drought the last 5 years, with the exception of last year. No rain during the summer, except for last year. And, actually we had quite a bit of rain in June and early July, which is abnormal for us. We had an extremely wet winter this year, such that the subsoil got a good soaking. If we can just make it to the end of August, I think we'll be okay. Most summers (except for last summer) we get absolutely no rain after May until September. So, the fact that we did get several summer storms, is something I was thankful for, knowing that we would probably have to ride out drought for the remainder of the summer. The heat is what is causing most of the damage in my yard - to the hostas, anemones, campanulas, hydrangeas, etc. But, they have made it through drought before, so there is no reason for me to believe that they won't make it again. They just turn crispy and die back to the ground. When the weather cools off in fall, they will pop back up. I wish I were into drought tolerant plants and xeriscaping, but I'm not. I love my water loving plants, my aroids, clematis, ferns, etc. I have to water because the darn trees suck it up from my plants. Drat those things! If they were pretty trees, I'd feel differently. If the NICE NEIGHBORS watered their trees, too, I'd feel differently about them. But NO - they let their trees go and don't do anything to take care of them. One of the neighbors keeps saying he is going to cut some of his down. His whole back yard is nothing but nasty disease-ridden trees, all planted so closely together that the branches rot and dry out and fall in MY yard. Grrrrr..... Susan...See More(Food) Price Index to All-Time High
Comments (14)God bless the grass that grows through cement. It's green and it's tender and it's easily bent. But after a while it lifts up its head, For the grass is living and the stone is dead, And God bless the grass. --Malvina Reynolds I was thinking about this some days ago, that they're covering over some of the best farmland in the world, in the San Joaquin Valley, with subdivisions. And how when there's no more food and water in the Valley, they'll be digging up houses and parking lots looking for good earth. I'm not a big food snob. I love a good burger, emphasis on the "good" (best I ever had was in a roadside stand in the backwoods of Oregon). I love Amy's Macaroni and Soy Cheeze (frozen prepared food). But in the past few years, in big city fine dining restaurants, I've had really fine meals only a couple of times. That wasn't a food quality issue or availability issue. It was a lack of care. And I think that's at the root of a lot of these other issues as well. I saw a report on TV about the "new cuts" of meat. They had people who "invented" them. A lot of it was about producing more affordable cuts that would cook up better than just cutting slabs off the larger hunk. What makes me wonder though is the growing popularity of cuts formerly thought to be inferior. Following the faddish popularity of fajitas, skirt steak became very popular and fine dining chefs are now treating it as a prize. The whole point of fajitas was that the skirt was cheap. It was tough and almost considered trimmings, and by marinating it for three days and frying it up with the onion and peppers it could be made into something yummy. There's very little skirt on an animal, however, so with low supply and high demand... Chicken wings became a thing because they used to be cheap too because they were undesirable. They're bony, little meat, and hard to cook. Even harder to eat with a knife and fork. They're not cheap anymore! But I did learn the trick to soup bones. The butcher told me. If you ask for soup bones in his store, it costs about the same as ground chuck. If you ask for dog bones, the same bones cost about $2/lb. I too miss the free bones (though they do give free shankbones for Passover), but $2 for meaty, marrowy bones doesn't feel outrageous. I was watching a news discussion show to see one of my dear ones showing her expertise, but just before her segment was a discussion of "food gentrification". They were talking about how rich people had discovered chard and driven up the price and now were doing the same with collards. They said this was affecting poor people's health, especially in the South where these greens have been an important staple, and nutritionally necessary....See MoreTime To Buy A US Index Fund?
Comments (25)Chisue - As the person in charge of our family's investments, I say yes, go ahead and buy into an index fund. With your already good diversification and common sense and understanding of the portfolio you already own, and with your children established, you are in an excellent position to do this. You do not need any detailed understanding of how the market works to invest in something as simple as an index fund. 23 years ago I invested in Vanguard's Index 500 fund and our investment has quadrupled over that time despite some pretty significant dips. I have withdrawn a small amount of money perhaps 4 - 5 times over the duration, when I didn't want to touch cash or our IRAs. The taxes and expenses on index funds are extremely low, another reason they are so attracitve. Despite all this, four times my original investment makes me happy! Just to establish my street cred. DH and I are nearing your age group and have similar concerns. Our children are grown and gone and on their own (and I do like to gift them with cash occasionally), so we are mainly involved with concerns of retirement right now, plus health issues, travel expenses, etc. We are in a fairly good situation and we have never used a financial advisor (although we've had good discussions with our accountant). I saw what "advisors" did to my mother. No thanks. Here's another thought: Money gurus recommend that senior citizens keep some money in stocks. People are living longer and need the financial growth that stocks provide, even if they don't plan to touch the money. I would suggest an Index 500 fund. This invests in the 500 largest companies in the USA, although sometimes fewer than 500 stocks are held. That really doesn't matter. Some recommend a total market index fund, which holds every domestic stock (more or less). I like the index 500, it follows the DOW (our 40 largest companies) pretty closely, so when I check CNBC I know pretty much where this particular investment is. I would do the Index 500, because it's so easy to understand. I would not invest outside the USA right now. I have held a little money in an international fund for almost 20 years, a good fund from a solid brokerage (T. Rowe Price), and it has barely doubled in that time. You can also ask the agent if a small cap index fund would be good now. It might be good to put most in the 500 and some in a small cap. But remember - these brokerage houses - Vanguard, Fidelity, etc., - are BY LAW not allowed to give you advice. They can only explain, very thoroughly, but they cannot tell you what you should do. There is no charge for your conversations with them, and they may not give you advice. Maybe a few little suggestions, but nothing that you could hold the company accountable for. Any time is the best time to invest. Get In and Stay In. Do not panic. I have always withheld a modest amount of money in case of severe crashes, so that I could buy a bit more on a serious dip, but I never bought a lot more, because I try not to market-time. One can go crazy trying to time the market! Fidelity has a great story about this. The market crashed badly in 1989-1990, just before the first Gulf War. Fidelity's people were innudated with calls from panicked customers. One of them answered a call and there was an elderly gentleman on the line. He was apparently not aware of the crash. He said that he had put a bit of money into the Fido's first mutual fund many years before and was wondering what it was worth. The callperson looked at his chart and saw how much that fund had just lost, but also, that it was up tremendously from his initial investment. "$300,000" she replied, worried about his reaction. "Yippee!" he yelled, and hung up. It's all a matter of perspective. Anyway, sorry for blathering on. How you do this: Call Vanguard from its online number and tell them that you want to invest in a mutual fund. They will transfer you to one of their agents. It is so simple. He will explain what to do and tell you that he will send you the forms. When they arrive, you fill them out, write the check and send it all in. Or you can probably do this over the phone if you have the money in a checking account, which can be linked to your Vanguard account. You can also do everything online with a linked account, but am not sure if that's possible for an initial investment. It would probably be good for you to talk to an actual human being on your first visit. These people are very accommodating! They are used to dealing with all kinds of people, of any age, any language ability, crabby, pleasant, whatever. Apologies for the lecture. I hope it helps. If you have any questions for me, I usually go to the Home Decor Conversations forum a few times a day. I might forget that I've been here. So give me a shout-out over there if necessary. And good luck. You are thinking very wisely....See Morevee_new
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