ecosistency

Lately i’m on a mission to declutter my living space so that someday i can live in a much smaller place. i’m trying to follow the 3 R’s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) with each and every item.

There is nothing like hindsight to illustrate how silly some purchases were (in the big picture). EG, at one time (perhaps 20 years ago), i felt highly empowered to expand the memory in my early-model personal computer (PC). Now, my current computer has 15,625 times this amount of memory.  There appears to be no environmentally good way to dispose of these old chips.  The local recycling center used to have an electronics recycling company, but they went out of business.  i hate the idea of burying my old stuff in the ground for all future generations to deal with!

Coldframes are like mini-greenhouses and can be used to extend the growing season in colder climates.   This post describes a “green technology” experiment i did in Spring 2010 to measure how much the temperatures increased in a simple coldframe.

Here is the coldframe i built, a simple wooden box with a semi-clear plastic cover tilted to the South:

Then i built an electronic circuit that measures the temperatures inside and outside (aka ambient, in the shade) and wirelessly sends the measurements once per minute to my main computer for logging and analysis:

Here are results from a full-sun Spring day in the Chicago area:

The blue line is the outside (ambient) temperature and follows a natural  curve from 9AM to 7PM.  The red line is the inside temperature and shows the “greenhouse effect”.  i manually intervened around Noon because the inside temperature got too hot (for healthy plants).

This illustration helps to explain other “anomalies”  in the above graph:

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This young plant, Solidago i believe (Goldenrod), has an interesting survival strategy. Send down a 2 inch “pipeline” root to where there is more moisture and then go root apeshit!  Click for more detail.

The virtues of no-till raised-bed gardening are widely documented.  Here’s a small tip to avoid stepping on your beloved garden soil in beds that are too wide or large to reach properly.    Here i am planting a 4′ wide bed and using a (curb-shopped:-) 4’9″‘ long piece of 2×10 to kneel on and a smaller piece of plywood to spread out the lesser amount of weight from my feet.  This arrangement gives a surprisingly ergonomic posture and can easily be shifted as you plant along the bed.