The battle begins.
Bought some 2, 4 D weed killer last week and sprayed a few horsenettle. Those plants are looking half dead. Then I read on an AG extension site that the roots are weakest when they’re flowering because they’re putting all their energy into reproducing. Went and looked at them this morning and they’re flowering, even the little ones. Seems early but something’s also chewed a lot of holes in the leaves so I think they went into flowering mode as a survival mechanism.
Hit most of them and used up the 24 oz spray bottle so I hit the Dollar store and they had it in the gallon sprayer for just a few bucks more than the small spray bottle. The sun’s on them so it dries out quick. I’m going to wait until the sun’s down past the trees and hit them again. Might be able to hit them again tomorrow after work if it’s not raining.
Speaking of trees. The few I cut down around the tunnel allow it to get sun a bit before 9am as of now. I’ll have to check throughout the rest of the year as the sun changes it’s path to see which other ones need to come down.
Hooked up the finish mower on the back of the tractor last weekend. Engaged the PTO and boy that thing was quiet. Took me a second to realize it has no belt on it so the blades weren’t spinning. I forgot it broke last year. That belt is $40 now, pretty much double what they were a few years ago.
The industrial PC(not pictured) with touchscreen is officially in control. Been using my laptop. Hard to get a good pic of a screen and I was holding the phone crooked. This monitor is mainly a screen for the automation modules. The modules have their own little web server so everything is accessed via a static IP address. 192.168.1.5 for this module. The other modules have different static IP addresses like 192.168.1.20 but the modules all all communicate with each other so I only need the one IP address for viewing sensor data and manually turning things on/off.
The "Tunnel PC" is running Debian Linux with the KDE Plasma desktop which is the same desktop my laptop runs so everything's familiar.
The touchscreen is set to turn off after 5 minutes of inactivity but a couple of taps on it wakes it right up. Hopefully it will do the same in the morning.
I have my coffee maker light set to turn on at 6am, same as my alarm clock but I usually get up before that so I'll be poking at this thing tomorrow while half asleep to be able to turn the coffee light on manually. I'm all out of network ports so my laptop no longer has access because I stole the network cable to plug into the "Tunnel PC".
The one module that runs my coffee light, the drip pump in the front yard garden and the grow lights will be staying up here so once I get the Tunnel stuff out there, I'll have my network port back for the laptop to house module. I like my little home automation stuff and actually want to do more of it, someday.
Now that this stuff isn't cluttering the table in the seed starting room, I'm going to start that tray of succession bok choy, tatsoi, collard, mustard and Salanova lettuce to see what survives the coming heat. After I do a little work on the tunnel and kill horsenettle. It's overcast now.