Good Morning! :-)
Mrs. Augie and I picked a few wild blackberries yesterday evening. There weren’t enough for a cobbler so we just ate em right off the vine. There’s a nice patch of them back in the woods but I’m not sure if it’s worth fighting the ticks to get to it.
It’s too muddy to dig post holes so I guess today will be weed whacker day. I don’t like weed whacker day. lol
I’m going through garden withdrawals. We’ve been gone for almost two weeks and can only imagine what shape the garden is in. And the lawn which hasn’t been mowed.
I had lots of tomatoes and had just finished cutting the garlic scapes and finished a big snow pea harvest. I hope we had some decent rain. I expectthe weeds to have thrived, though.
I’m just praying God is protecting it as He has in the past.
Did some weeding yesterday. Between a wet Spring, me using overhead micro-sprinklers when I direct sowed some seed and an inch of rain a couple of nights ago, it was quite jungle like. I’m sticking to drip from now on and will start things indoors and put out seedlings instead of seeds.
Gotta pick some shisito peppers today and get the mushroom spawn started. Picked up a few more bags of manure + compost for that.
None of the salad greens are liking Summer, mainly because the summer bugs really like the greens. Will have to try again with some insect netting. The greens made it through the high 90s just fine and they’re calling for the 80s all week which would be even better, if the bugs didn’t already destroy them.
Lowe’s is no help. Only netting they have says, “Small 1/4 In holes in plastic netting prevents insect penetration”.
Finally getting really close with automating the linear actuator that I’ll be using to open/close the seed room window, which is basically bench testing for doing the same with tunnel sides. The actuator takes 6-7 seconds to open/close. Relays can be on/off/pulse with pulse being an on signal for a set time. 3.2 seconds puts it as 50% from either extent.
Had to do a workaround. The X-420 is the unit that reads the wind speed but it has no relays. It can read/write to other units over ethernet but the 3.2 second pulse won’t work, probably due to a lag over the ethernet. Finally figured out a more direct approach. The X-420 has digital outputs which is a 5 vdc signal. The new X-332 with 16 relays that I’m using to run the actuators, also has 16 digital inputs.
Connected a X-420 digital output signal to a X-332 digital input. Instantaneous communication.
Wind speed over ** mph turns on a X-420 output(tested with temp sensor but wind will work too)
Digital input on X-332 is used to pulse a relay on the X-332 for 3.2 seconds to extend the linear actuator half way
Of course it gets trickier. Wind over ** mph closes window or tunnel side half way. Wind under ** mph opens it fully again. Great, but it’s gusty here in hill country. I could end up with the sides opening/closing every 10 seconds if I’m not careful.
I need to learn the timer feature. Wind over ** mph starts timer countdown. When timer reaches zero, if wind is still over ** mph, close tunnel sides half way.