6ixString's Home Improvement and Mindless Ramblings Thread....
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Monday, May 9, 2016 00:48
VIEWED: 54567
PAGE 16 of 21
Hey....
Has anybody used one of these before?????
http://menards.com/main/building-materials/landscaping-materials/edger
s/garden-wizard-raised-bed/p-1727122-c-5783.htm
It's the "Garden Wizard Raised Bed Garden" It's a 4'x4', self irrigating decorative bed with resin composite that doesn't fade and looks like bricks.
I was at my bro and sis-in-law's house for a barbeque tonight and with all the gardening they're planning on doing, they got me a bit stoked to do this. I LOVE tomatoes, and she says they're VERY easy to grow. All you have to do is pay about 2-3 bucks for a vine of the cherry tomatoes and she was getting about a pint worth of tomatoes everyday once they started blooming until about mid-October last year off of just 3 plants. That was 9 bucks of plants, a little weed preventer and watering and assuming a harvest like that every day for the months of June to October, that's about 40 bucks worth of tomatoes a season... far more than I could ever eat. And they're a lot better than the insecticide ridden ones you'd buy at the store!
I've seen this particular unit go for as much as 250 bucks at different places, but Menards has it for only 99 bucks! I'd have to drive a bit to get it since there out of stock almost everywhere, but I kind of figure why when everybody else charges so much for them. I posted the Home Depot specs since Menards' website is kind of lacking compared to Home Depot and Lowes....
Self irrigating, and a maintinance free composite? What could go wrong?
I just can't believe there aren't any reviews ANYWHERE online for it.
I think I'm going to pull the trigger and buy it this week. For whatever reason, even after re-seeding the area I believe was a sandbox before I filled it with dirt from scratch 10 days ago, the grass is still barely taking hold there. My brother had mentioned that this would be a perfect place for a 4x4 garden. 
If I can really get 400 bucks worth of tomatoes a year, and maybe have room for a few other vegetable plants there, I think that would really ease my pain for paying more in taxes than anyone else on the block. I always wanted to set something like this up down the road, but why wait until then... For about 150 bucks upfront costs, I could be well on my way for having so many free vegetables for the season that I'll be giving away the surplus to my neighbors. 
The grass is still filling in good in the pool hole, Mama Rabbit is still tending to the kids, and I saw them kicking up a storm in the nest today.
Everything's gravy.... at least, that is, until my water bill comes in next week.......
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History of erasing evidence of a 29ft crater in my back yard.....
Late September:
(I really wish I'd taken a picture of the weeds and stones before getting even to this point. This was before 15 yards of dirt was filled in.)
Late April: (After dirt filled in)
May 3rd:
May 9th: (Pre Re-weeding)
May 21st: (About 1/2 of re-weeding and lawn patch done)
May 31st: 
(As you can see in the background, the weeds have all but re-taken the "crabbage patch" after all of that work. There is some solid grass in there though. I think I'll just keep weed'n'feeding it and overseeding it during early spring and late fall and just keep mowing it down. Hopefully in a few years the grass will crowd the weeds out. At least, I've heard that works if you're diligent about it.)
I'm giving up thinking I'll have the pool filled in before it's too hot to do any more work, but all in all not too shabby. Once the rabbits move out of the hole I'm just going to weed'n'feed it and start mowing it regularly with the rest of the lawn. After the double work done on the weeding here, I'm hoping to have this part of the lawn completely looking nice by next summer.
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JO!!!!!!
Need your crazy math skillz buddy!
The fight against property taxes is back on!
I've come across some new information today that can really Break the case on their part. It seems that, even though almost EVERYTHING is wrong about the card and some of it is in my favor, they're claiming this land is not in a flood plane and I just checked with the village and it still is considered a flood plane. So not only should that devalue the worth of the land, but when they see that my basement is unfinished, they can't deny me not wanting to EVER finish it when it could flood again at any time, and they can't just chalk that up to lesser value on the home because it was a foreclosure sale.
So... since the game is on... let me send you a rough, and not at all measured out draft of the REAL acerage of my property as opposed to what they're claiming...
The dimensions and footage laid out, are what the taxes are based off of now. I haven't even checked to see if these are real yet. The problem is, the "black line" that goes through the pic is where underground pipes are placed, so there is a very large easement of this property they're still taxing me on. As I said, I haven't measured this yet, and this pic and my calculations are based off of eyeballing the yellow markers on mine and my neighbors property and guessing off the original figure. I will be doing the dirty work this weekend though.
I used a program called sketchandcalc.com. It's "pretty" cool, but it could do some upgrades that would allow you to put exact numbers instead of just scroll around and hope for the best. Since I was able to get really close numbers to what I assumed, I'll go with what the site values were.
Based off of the new black line (and the complete inability to give the EXACT dimensions I wanted to in the program), I had a left side of 78.35ft, top of 135.5, right of 91.68 and bottom of 135.02.
This gave me a total acreage of .264 acres.
The ORIGINAL on my taxes completely threw away the irregular form of the lawn and just said it was a perfect 118x134 foot rectangle, for .363 acres.
The ORIGINAL land value based off of their callous calculations is $41,800.
With the new, albeit guessed acreage, I come up with $30,400.
I do like to think that my eyeballing is correct.
At this point, that's really my only question to you. Is my eyeballing pretty on, or way off? I assume with the existing dimensions and the new black line, the new property lines would only be 72.72727272727272727272727273% of the claimed land.
(Actually... I have another question.... what would my true acreage be just based off of their original claims to the sq footage without my black line???? I bet it's still less than their bastardized 118x134 measurements!)
Before I commit myself to this, I'd like anyone's opinions here before I open the proverbial can of worms. I've constructed a Pros and Cons list, and a "maybe" list on the side.
Pros.....
1) They claim I have 2 A/C units. There are no A/C units.
2) They claim I have Heat in the 1st, 2nd and sub floor footage. There is only overhead heat on the 1st and 2nd floor. (There is a spot in the crawl for a furnace, but there have probably been 4 furnaces at least since the house was made that "died" because of flooding).
3) The claim I have aluminum siding. I have vinyl siding.
4) They claim I don't live in a flood plain, and I just verified with the village today that I do.
5) They claim that I have 3 bedrooms, and 7 finished rooms, but with a completely unfinished and constantly flooded basement over the years, I only have 2 bedrooms and 4 finished rooms.
6) They claim my back enclosed porch is 280 sq ft. The actual sq footage is just over 210 sq ft. (The unfinished storage shed is included in this figure to make 280 sq ft, but it's already billed separately as a non
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Geez... I hope my RWED Posts haven't killed any interaction in this forum. I feel like the sound a tree falling in the forest makes when nobody is there to listen...
This book is Amazing! All New Square Foot Gardening: http://www.amazon.com/All-Square-Foot-Gardening-ebook/dp/B0055IW8R0
My garden has cost me a small fortune to start up now, but until I decide to make more of them the upkeep costs should be next to nothing from here on out. If I grow just tomatoes in it this year, I should easily make that money back and more compared to prices I'd pay in the grocery store.
I'm going to build up the sides beneath the raised garden with the flat cinderblock stones I had pulled out of the pool area and elsewhere on the property. I will still have to bend down a bit to garden, but it will be raised enough where animals won't have an easy time getting to it, particularly the bunnies. (I hope to start constructing it all this week, so I'll have pics of what I'm doing along the way).
Materials/Costs so far:
GARDEN CONSTRUCTION:
1 Raised Garden Self Watering 4x4 bed: $99.99
1 3/4"x4'x4' medium grade, untreated plywood (on sale): $15.97
12 4" strips of wood lath (for the grid): $2.28
60 cinderblock-tops to build it off the ground: FREE
1 Tarp to wrap the plywood with: Reused from previous job, so essentially FREE
"MEL'S MIX" PERFECT RAISED GARDEN INGREDIENTS:
2 1.5 cubic foot bags of Varmiculite: $25.98
3 cubic feet compressed Peat Moss: %9.99
2 40 lb bags of cow manure compost: $3.94
2 .75 cubic foot bags of Mushroom based compost: $7.74
(There will be about .4 cubic feet of Varmiculite, 3 uncompressed cubic feet of peatmoss and .4 cubic feet of compost left over for another garden with these measurements. I'll probably give the rest to my brother and sis-in-law if they choose this route for their gardening project)
PLANTS:
Dunno yet... I haven't gotten that far. They're relatively cheap, and I'll HAVE to buy them this first year, but I plan on doing this all from seeds starting next year when I get ahead of the weather.
My guess, for the square footage, about $20 bucks for the plants.
So, in the end, for this first season, the upfront costs for this garden will be $185.89 plus tax. I know that that seems staggering, but at the same time, the book says that a single 4x4 raised garden bed properly done will garner a large salad for a single adult every single day during harvesting season.
I don't know about where you live, but by me it can cost $3 to $5 dollars for a salad mix bag full of washed vegetables raised with pesticides and man made fertilizers. I look at this as an investment of having a "Home Goods" store right in my back yard, and because I sprung for the self watering system it's a nearly maintenance free home goods at that. It should easily pay for itself and more in just one season.
Doing it Mel's way, it would be MUCH cheaper. Being handy and cheap like I am, I could have easily gone this route, but the idea of having a nearly maintenance free garden to start with that watered itself, I spent 100 bucks on the 4x4 kit that I could have built nearly for free if I scavenged around for wood planks to make the box out of.
There's THREE great things about "Mel's Mix":
1) You don't have to fertilize it EVER! The only thing you have to do between growing new plants is to add new compost (by far the cheapest ingredient of the mix). The Vermaculite and Peat Moss are nutrient free and don't biodegrade. You don't mix any infertile, weed infested, soil from your yard in the mix, and you start with a great base of 2 materials that retain water, allow drainage, and allow room for root growth, and the nutrients all come from the compost.
2) You barely have to till between growing... just enough to mix the new compost in. Since the garden is raised and nobody will ever be walking on it, combined with the &
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Here's hoping everything goes according to plan....
Oh yeah, cause that'll happen for sure.
If yer planning to grow tomatoes, you really oughta talk to Dreamtrove about, cause he knows way more about that kinda thing, and what I know wouldn't fill a thimble - seriously, gardening is WAY out of my competence zone, I only even recently figured our soil PH might friggin matter...
-F
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Quote:
Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:Quote:
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
Here's hoping everything goes according to plan....
Oh yeah, cause that'll happen for sure.
If yer planning to grow tomatoes, you really oughta talk to Dreamtrove about, cause he knows way more about that kinda thing, and what I know wouldn't fill a thimble - seriously, gardening is WAY out of my competence zone, I only even recently figured our soil PH might friggin matter...
-F
Haha.... Why should I believe that this plan will be different than any of the others?
If I run into problems I'll take your advice there. I don't know if Dreamtrove does the Square Gardening Method or not, but if he doesn't, he's doing a completely different type of gardening and it would be like a Chemist trying to teach an Engineer student their job using Chemist ideas.
The only reason I know anything about Ph of the soil is because Mel mentions it in the book. He only goes further on about it to say that you'll NEVER have to have your soil tested for PH, and that he won't even bother explaining it in the book since we won't have to know what it means or ever have to pay to have it fixed.
Really Frem, if you don't know shit about gardening, as I didn't 2 months ago before pulling a billion weeds and trying to get grass to grow over 1,600 feet with moderate success, I probably wouldn't attempt it either. I think it's going to be REALLY easy with this system, and a 4'x4' garden that could supply an adult male with one essentially free salad a day for life after it pays for itself could be done for MUCH cheaper than I did it.
Maybe you should buy "Square Foot Gardening" for that kick ass girl you think so highly of????
If things go well here for me, I'll have 4 more of these next year at least. I'll be well on my way to moving on from vegetables to having my own chicken coop in a few years. Maybe some solar panels on the roof and a corn burning furnace for the winter. Maybe one day I'll be brewing my own beer and growing my own tobacco too?
Who says you can't support yourself, even in the suburbs?
If I'm going to be paying so damn much in property taxes to largely support schools and welfare for kids, when I don't have any of my own, Isn't it about high time I made my property work for me????
As for the garden.....
I get the actual garden walls tomorrow, and I've got my mix all ready to go. I took quite a few pictures, so I could document my step-by-step approach to prep-work I did on my own that isn't discussed in the book. This is the Extra type of stuff that he says a lot of gardening enthusiasts can and will do to make the project their own. Actually, this part took me less time than I thought it would, although I did have to do a bit of extra work fixing things. I know for next time though that I would have done something completely different and I'll mention that in the step-by-step that follows.....
BUILDING MY OWN SQUARE FOOT GARDEN (SFG) SYSTEM; PART 1:
STEP 1: HAVE ALL OF YOUR TOOLS AND MATERIALS READY.
4'x4' sheet of 3/4" plywood (non-treated... the treated stuff will poison your food).
Aluminum tape (The type you would buy to secure ductwork elbows above your water heater.
Staple gun (loaded with staples, duh!)
Cordless Drill with a 1/4" wood bit.
Pencil
Tape Measurer (If you have a 4-foot T square, the job will be MUCH easier, I didn't have one yet.)
A tarp that measures at least 5'x5'
Also, since the entire idea behind Square Foot Gardening is that it can be planted anywhere and that you NEVER mix it with the crappy soil in your lawn, you can put it up as high as you'd like. Since this is my first year doing this,
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Been bizzy lately, so sorry I didnt get to your questionz.
Me, mad math skillz? HA! But, sq ft calculationz are very basic. Just get out there with a tape measure and get the real numbrz. I dont know if itll help that much with the taxez, but like you sed, its worth a try. Just be nice wen talking with the burokrats. If you get on their bad side, they can make it a personal vendetta and rap you up in red tape for ever.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.nooalf.com
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Very basic for you JO, lol.... Give me a square or a rectangle and I'm golden. Give me something with 4 different sized sides and I'm lost. I better get out there soon since I only have until Friday to file an appeal.
I'll be sure to bring plenty of tact to the table. Never bad advice there when it comes to the gumment.
BUILDING MY OWN SQUARE FOOT GARDEN (SFG) SYSTEM; PART 2:
This part won't have much to it, because putting the box together was easy and mixing the ingredents for Mel's Mix was pretty self explanatory.
STEP 1: PUT THE BOX TOGETHER
Just follow the instructions and when you're done it will look something like this.
An additional step I took was to add the Aluminum tape along the bottom for stability and to keep any water from seeping out of the sides. You could probably skip this step though, because especially when you've filled the sides with water, that beast isn't going anywhere.
The only other note I have is to follow the instructions and loop the hoses over each other, and NOT to do what my brother and I tried. The way the hoses were pictured on the picture on the front of the box seemed to be a smarter way to do it, but these water-permiable hoses kink something aweful, and once you've bent them out of position it's impossible to keep them from kinking up, even if you went the right way with them. The only negative effect I see now is that several of the sides won't fill each other up because of the kinks, I think that the water should still be able to make it out to the middle before the kinks though so the irrigation feature should still work fine.
Oh... I also skipped the step to put the anti-weed fabric on the bottom. The drainage holes are so small, I don't think that it matters.
STEP 2: MAKING THE MEL'S MIX
The book says to buy 5 different types of Compost. I wasn't able to locate more than two around me.
Also, to make things easier, I simply put in 3 cubic feet of each ingredient, rather than try to figure out how much 2.67 cubic feet of each ingredient would be.
1/3 Compost (2 40lb bags of horse manure and 2 .75 cubic foot bags of mushroom based compost)
1/3 Peat Moss (A little less than 1/2 of a full bale)
1/3 Vermiculite (2 1.5 cubic foot bags)
Spread out a tarp and mix the compost together.
Add the peat moss and with a metal rake do your best to till them together until the color is uniform. With a friend, you can pull up the sides of the tarp to further mix it and keep raking it in.
Add the Vermiculite and mix it together until everything looks even.
This step will take a little bit of time and energy.
STEP 3: FILLING YOUR GARDEN
Drag the tarp so it butts right against your garden so if you drop any off of your shovel (which you will), it will fall back into the pile. Just shovel away until you can pull up the opposite side of the tarp to condense the last of it, shovel again, and then with a friend when not much is left carefully pick up the tarp and pour the rest in. Spread the mix evenly in the box.
END PART TWO
Here's what it looks like now:
What do you think? Not too shabby huh?
I hope to pick up my plants tomorrow and get everything started. I'll be taking pics of it every week or so and keeping record of how much produce I get. I'll just be starting with tomatoes this year, but I hope to expand that a lot next season.
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Grrrrrr.......
Note to self, Anything that sounds as easy as a "self watering garden" comes with many problems of its own.....
It's got a pinhole leak on one of the corners, on the inside of the joint. There is no way I can get to it until late fall when I pack it up (or without about a days worth of work of removing all the soil, dumping the water, fixing the leak... waiting a day for it to dry, filling it all back up and then planting). I'll make it work this season, but I'll have to figure out a way to patch it before next year.
I worked on tightening the hoses and hollowing out the top layer of bricks so my corner drainage holes could actually drain (duh!). Glad I had a spare masonry blade lying around for my Skilsaw. At least fixing the hoses kept the leak from being bad. I lost about 15 gallons of water overnight since we only hand-tightened the hoses. I worked out all the kinks, set it up right and used a cresent wrench to clamp them in and now the water leak is barely noticible.
Tomatoes will be bought and planted tomorrow, so help me!!!!!
Oh... and I'll also be taking my drug test tomorrow too, and assuming no black marks on my background check (which there won't be), I've got my orientation on Sunday and I start work on the 18th. It's not much, but it's 3 nights a week at above minimum wage. Should be enough to cover about 90% of my regular bills, and give me 4 days a week to figure out how to make more money and to look for a better job. In the mean time, it's unloading trucks and staging merchandise... just the type of low level job with a million menial tasks to perform that will make the night fly by for me, in a store that only has about 5 people in it at those hours.
I know I'm capable of so much more than that, but if I've got to be scraping the bottom of the barrel right now for jobs, I can't think of a better position to be working with my personality.
The only thing that could make this suck now is if I'm working along side a couple of real dicks. Here's hoping that my new co-workers share my shiny, happy personality
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Congrats!
I hav sum luk myself lately. More machining work than usual, so I will be able to pay sum billz this month.
Odd polygonz are easy to calculate area. Just lopp off trianglez till you hav a rectangle. And the area uv trianglez iz 1/2 hite x width.
----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early
http://www.nooalf.com
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