Saturday, November 16, 2013

The peppers are done.

I wrote quite a bit about peppers this year.  I started several from seed early in the year.  They went into the ground in April and didn't do well.  I had to start more from seed in May.  Eventually I got peppers to grow and was able to get several good harvests.  Well, they are finally done.  Somehow they managed to survive the first frost, but not this most recent one.  It got down into the 20's and when I came out in the morning it was obvious that they were dead.
The kale and cabbage are doing fine.
 


My cell phone takes lousy pictures in the morning when the sun isn't over the garden.  The picture below was taken at a different time and is a little better. 
I'm actually impressed that the peppers lasted as long as they did.  They outlasted pretty much everything else and made it mid-November.  The only stuff out there now is the kale and cabbage that I planted for a Fall garden.

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The final overflow rain barrel fix.

One of my overflow rain barrels is lower than the rest of my rain barrels and as a result it overflows.
The only solution I could come up with is to fill the barrel from the top with a float valve and empty the barrel from the bottom with a check valve.  I took care of installing the check valve a few weeks ago.  With that taken care if it was time to install another float valve
I decided to install it using a 1/2" FPTxFPT coupling.  I screwed the float valve into the coupling and then screwed the other end of the coupling to the brass overflow that I had installed on the rain barrel
I look at this now and realize that I could have removed the brass overflow and just screwed the float valve directly into the barrel.  Oh well, that can be a project for another time.  Until then, this will work.