Weather, Machines & Harvest Help

You might think that weather forecasting is an exact science. All those thousands of sensors around the globe, satellites circling the earth feeding information to humongous super-computers with the power to undertake billions of calculations per second but still they don’t get it right half of time.

However, I’ve developed a short-range, highly accurate (90%) system. Based on just two sensors in the optical range, enhanced with varifocals, and one combined moisture and temperature sensor – aka my skin. The less-than sophisticated software in my central computer then predicts the weather for the next hour at least!

Having detected that it wasn’t raining I thought it opportune to strim down the patch between the greenhouse and walled garden. Because it’s really overgrown, changed the strimmer line for the brushcutter blade, which is much more effective with really overgrown situations.

Now I’ve only had the strimmer a couple of years and after the first year it decided not to start, which cost me to have fixed. This time it wasn’t just difficult to start but once going it just kept dying.

After some fiddling and creative use of Anglo-Saxon invective it was bunged in the car and taken to the strimmer fettlers who reckoned they would give me a call in a week or so. What’s really frustrating is that judging by how much got done in the few minutes it was running, a good hour or two would have done the job.

I’m sure it’s one of those things that a mechanic will adjust in a few minutes but I’m totally lacking the mechanical gene. Topping up the oil in the car is about my limit!

Back home I got the lawnmower out only for that to start playing silly bees. Normally the Briggs and Stratton easy start engine goes first pull, every time but it was obviously going out in sympathy with the strimmer.

That evening I consulted with the manual and various videos and decided to change the oil, clean the air filter and check the plug. This is technical stuff (for me)

Well the oil change was accomplished but I managed to get oil over the paper air filter so back to the repair shop where the good news was the strimmer was fixed already. It was a cracked fuel pipe causing the problems. Picked up a new spark plug at the same time.

Back home the strimmer went like a bomb and after a replacing the air filter and plug so did the lawnmower. Took the mower down a notch and gave the lawn area a cut followed by fertilising. Knowing how deficient in nutrients the soil is (from my test kit) I used a mix of 2 parts Growmore (equal NPK) and 1 part nitro-chalk to up the nitrogen level.

The weather is predicting much needed rain on Saturday which will dissolve and wash the fertiliser in.

Harvest Help

I wish I’d had a camera handy to photograph this. I was harvesting a few potatoes from the raised beds whilst my grandson, Gabriel, was burning off some energy by crawling at high speed around the field.

So, little man appears by my side and decides to help. He climbed over into the raised bed and made a manful attempt to lift the fork. I thought the sharp ends might be a danger so moved that but he was determined to keep helping.

He sat their passing me potatoes which I popped into the trug. He didn’t get it totally right, when he couldn’t find any more potatoes in the bed he passed me ones from the trug but for 14 months what can you expect?

The lad’s a natural!