Hoop Bender

This week has been too busy, we have only had a grand total of two hours to work on farm projects all week.

One of those hours was spent gathering information.

In the garden beds, in direct sunlight in the middle of the day, soil temps are about 50 degrees.

Under the cold frame the soil temp is almost 60 degrees.

Something has been digging in my garden! And it shoved the cold frame to one side and crushed one of my baby brussels sprouts.

The rest seem to be doing okay, although the cold frame does dry out the surface layer of the soil. With nighttime temperatures getting below 36 every night, we can’t do without it yet.

The pasture is 349 feet long. Thinking about putting a fence down the middle of it.

There are a couple of tiny little shoots on this red willow.

And this witch hazel! It’s getting to be spring!

Another half hour spent digging down to the bottom of the broken yard hydrant yielded an interesting discovery.

There is water coming out of the seep hole.

Quite a lot of water, in a steady stream, as it turns out. So where was that coming from? Back tracking to the junction of the rainwater circuit with the main circuit showed it was not coming from the main line. So it had to be coming from the rainwater circuit. However, the pump was turned off and unplugged, so it couldn’t be coming through the pump. Could it?

As a matter of fact, it was. When I turned the shutoff valve at the base of the tank, the stream stopped. This means that some gasket inside the pump is so broken that water is flowing right through the whole pump and out the other side.

I have a replacement for the gasket that I think is involved, but now I am not so sure that this is going to be adequate. We will have to try it and see.

With the remaining hour of work time we built a form to bend conduit to make a low tunnel. First, mark off the semi circle, 38 inches in diameter (the garden rows are 36 inches). Then cut it out.

I don’t have a spare workbench or functional picnic table, so we screwed the form to the saw horses.

1/2″ conduit.

This doesn’t work all that well, the saw horses just slide on the cement, so…

Add some weight. And just like that, a conduit is now a cold frame hoop. We didn’t have time to make any more, because Evie had a school project deadline so we rushed out of the shop and got in the car and haven’t been back since.

It’s fine. We’ll get it done one of these years.