Posted on 05/01/2025 6:15:12 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
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BFL......
“”Good afternoon, Diana in Wisconsin and all y’all! Thought for the day:””
Great thought and great pic. I’m saving & sharing it. Thanks!
I’m growing lots of weeds against my intent.
Thanks Adam......
I’m harvesting a nice asparagus crop. Next year when the plants are more mature, we’ll be overrun with it.
Everything else I put in is doing well. I’ll be harvesting Romaine soon.
I do that first part, too. Mainly because I’m lazy, but then you don’t have to dilute it with any water, which makes it extra good. I have added vanilla extract, but ginger sounds good, too!
Wisconsin was the #1 producer of hemp back in WWII for rope for the military.
Look in any ditch around here and you’ll still find some. ;)
Making a good dent in my ‘Things To Do’ list, though there’s still plenty to go.
They’re doing the first cut of the Alfalfa today and it smells HEAVENLY with the breeze blowing the scent in the direction of the front porch. Windows open, for sure!
Beau temporarily fixed my falling-off roof vent, but the other works fine. It’s time to start moving tomatoes and peppers OUT of the greenhouse for the daytime hours to toughen them up a little before planting them out next weekend.
Sunny, breezy, cooler for a few days, then back to the 70’s by next weekend. Chances of rain Tues/Wed. I can live with that. :)
Mmmmm......the ginger is a great addition.
Removing posts with a car jack
You can purchase car jacks at places like Northern Tool or Harbor Freight.
I have that exact jack - it’s heavy duty & just plain ‘heavy’ to move around. We jacked out several old wooden fence posts with it.
I have T-posts to remove. You can’t nail a board to a metal T-post. I have a chain & after watching another video, a remedy seems to be a bolt to hold the chain together around the post - don’t have one big enough so will have to visit the Farm Bureau.
In the video, the jack handle is red & fairly short. We have that handle (comes with the jack) but Dad also got a piece of metal pipe that is 2-3 times longer for extra leverage.
That was quite the understatement. London, KY, got hit terribly badly...
Earlier, a tornado formed right at a spot I fished at some years ago, and have driven by hundreds of times in the past:
It went on to become an F3 (prelim estimate by NWS) and do quite a bit of damage on the south side of Marion, IL.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC0x_i-c7bc&t=3s
Western KY got mostly storms with big hail tho’ there were several tornado warnings, and Eastern MO including the St. Louis area and down into the Bootheel got whacked hard, with several fatalities, too.
I tried to beat round 2 with a trip to town and got got stuck in the shelter area (rear) of Wal Mart for over an hour due to multiple tornado warnings. Got out of there and got back home, and Round 3 sent us to the basement for an hour, with a tornado warning, a brief break, and then another warning. Power went out and after a while the sump pit was really getting full. We have two power feeds to the property, from separate power company lines, and the one NOT powering the sump pump cane back on, so, I ran my two heaviest extension cords to the sump pump to win that battle.
Once the storms were passed here, I did a check around the yard — no major problems (I thought), just some small branches down, a couple slightly larger, and a few things blown around or over. But, then I went to check the ditches, and found a large branch had come down on the road that passes in front of our house. This was way down almost @ the east end of our property though. “Large” as in roughly 10” diameter. Though it had broken off a tree on our property, it was mostly across the centerline on our neighbor’s side, running at a shallow angle to the road. THAT took a while to clear... Then I went back out in the morning to get the ditches cleared. That took even longer.
Thank God you’re alright.
I’ve seen some images of the tornado damage and it’s horrific.
This has been a bad spring for severe weather.
And yet, all the naysayers will still vilify meteorologists for warning people. Everyone remembers when they’re off, not always wrong but not as bad as could have been. Nobody credits them when they’re right. They’ll remember it, for sure, as the day when they lost everything, including family members. But not that the dire predictions were true.
I’ve read complaints that warnings came late for London, KY, but, I don’t know if that’s really true. In our area, both NWS and the experienced TV mets seem to be really on the ball when it comes to actual warnings, storm assessments, etc. Of course they have much better tools now, than even 10 or 20 years ago.
It’s true that sometimes “rotations” get a lot of attention, but, one thing that is still uncertain is how much any given one may suddenly strengthen. Better safe than sorry...
One minor “gripe” is that in big counties like ours, for example, the northwest end of the county may be perfectly safe, while the southeast end is under the gun. Our TV mets are pretty good about this, but our county emergency managers will keep the sirens on for the whole county, until every inch of it is clear. Instead of in the basement listening to the siren, I could have been “out” 30 minutes sooner clearing that big tree branch off the road, and, who knows - that could have helped out emergency services a bit if they’d been needed. (We have no TV in the basement - I guess I could work on that someday... Jeez, just another project...)
Heh, the jacks that came with our Subie Outbacks are so flimsy they are unsafe to use on any but a perfectly flat paved surface. I went out and got SUV jacks for both, on eBay, B4 shipping got so bloody expensive...
One of those light jacks would likely be fine for fence post pulling. A 4 x 4 and a little wire or chain is probably faster, though.
So sorry to hear this. Prayers for you and your family and friends!
Our location looked like it was gonna get some big time hail out of the storm’s “hail core”, but, fortunately it weakened a few miles B4 it got here. The garden is breathing a sigh of relief!
One bad thing is that a well developed (overwintered indoors) tomato plant that had been dug up by an animal several days ago (per one of my posts above) was successfully restarting root growth in a 2 liter soda bottle. But, that got knocked over by a big gust, and I didn’t get to it quickly. So it dried out and IDK if it can now be salvaged or not. Drat - the thing was setting fruits even in that bottle! :-(
I was just now reading that one can protect young tomato transplants from cutworms by attaching a metal “pin” or wire to the lower stalk. I’d never heard of this.
I have in the past taken some partially crumpled el-cheapo (thin) aluminum foil and loosely wrapped it around the lower stem. (6” high or so.) The stem will just break right through it as the plant grows. The “pin” or wire is interesting, though...
Wow! That was a lot of work. I can’t imagine what re-building is like for so many that have lost homes and farms in a random storm.
Wisconsin had total damage to two separate farms in those same storms, but no loss of human life; not sure about the animals. :(
So Pete ... the video you posted got me noodling & I have an 💡!!
The jack is plenty heavy enough to do the job - dad got some huge round fence posts out of the ground with it, using a chain. He put screws in the post so the chain had something to lift against.
My issue is having something on the metal post to lift against AND the part of the jack that lifts is that small little piece that sticks out. The 2x4 in the video worked great, SO I think if I drill holes in a similar piece of 2x4 & wire it to the T-posts in 2 or 3 places, making sure the wire is under the little knobs on the post, that will give me something to lift/jack against.
I have wire, but it’s fairly thin. If I triple or quadruple it, should work. If it won’t hold up, the wire from a wire coat hanger should do it (I know where I can find one).
😁
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