Dealing with spider mites

Spider mites on a lemon plant.
Photo credit: Paramecium

If you also garden, you may have had run-ins with spider mites before. They're troublesome miniature arachnids that can easily colonize the entirety of even large plants, covering them in a fine web and damaging the leaves and stems to feed. We just successfully handled a pretty gnarly infestation of them in our Hollyhocks, and since (truly helpful) information about them on the web is sparse, I'll share with you what I learned in the process.

The woman I talked to at my favorite nursery told me that spider mites often get out of control when the temperature increases suddenly without any rainfall. They thrive in warm temperatures and low humidity (according to Wikipedia about 80F is their favorite).

It's also important to know that the web they cover the plant in isn't just a byproduct or an unfortunate accident. It's an important part of their life, as it serves to protect the otherwise tiny and defenseless buggers from predators. So your primary goals should be to lower the temperature, increase the moisture and wreck their webs so they're defenseless against predators.

Remove the large colonies
Your first step is to cut off any large colonies you can find. They should be easy to spot, and will often be under leaves. If the plant is established and can take it, it's easiest and most effective to just cut off the leaves with the worst infestations. Put them in a plastic bag and throw them away. You don't want the wee creatures wandering off and infesting somewhere else close to wherever you put the cut leaves.

Destroy the webs
Now it's time to get out a hose and just spray the whole plant down. Be thorough and aggressive. Your goal is not primarily to wash off the mites (although that will certainly happen). Your goal is to ruin and remove their webs, exposing the mites to natural predators and undoing all the work they have done to create a safe, hospitable environment for themselves.

Wetting the leaves has the added benefit of creating droplets of water, which attract ladybugs. It's a surprisingly little known fact that ladybugs are fearsome predators in the tiny insect world. If you're a gardener they are your best friend, because they don't do any harm to plants, but will eat just about any small pest that might try to move in -- and they're pretty too.

Chemical control
We were lucky enough to have them only on large, well established and hardy plants. Our Hollyhocks' roots might be older than I am, and they can take some abuse. If you've got bad mites on a smaller, more delicate plant you may want to use an insecticide of some kind. I haven't ever really needed an insecticide for our garden (knock on wood), but just in case I ever do I've got this one bookmarked on Amazon: Safer Brand 5110 Insect Killing Soap

I don't recommend a toxic modern chemical insecticide. Spider mites are hardy things that evolve very fast. They are known to develop resistance to insecticides as quickly as in a single season, so such measures are at best a temporary solution. At worst, toxic insecticides also kill predators like ladybugs, whose populations take much longer to bounce back. In the absence of predators, expect to need a lot more insecticide later. If you kill everything the populations of mites and aphids will soon explode, unchecked by natural predation.

Remember: your goal is not to utterly destroy them with a chemical scorched earth attack. Your goal is just to weaken them with something relatively harmless, then let the natural ecosystem of predator and prey balance itself back out.

DIY yakitori - delicious meat on a stick

Since this photo was taken I've beveled the skewer handles.
It looks a lot nicer that way.

Inspired by an article in the latest issue of MAKE Magazine, I built my own version of a Yakitori grill.

For the uninitiated, a Yakitori grill is a trough of charcoal with skewers that have an S-shaped bend at the handle end. This allows them to be easily turned between two positions 180 degrees apart. It's a common way of grilling meat in Japan, and in fact according to a Japanese-speaking buddy of mine "yaki tori" translates pretty literally to "grilled chicken."

It's an excellent way to grill some meat, with a few gotchas:

• I've been having trouble with the meat not turning with the skewers. I turn the skewer, and the meat just spins around on it. I'm going to try roughing up the skewers a little with a coarse sandpaper, and if that doesn't work I'll make new ones with flat steel strips instead of round wire.
• I've also had trouble keeping the coals hot. It may have been that I was using the dregs of a bag of hardwood charcoal, so the pieces are too small and just smothering themselves.
• If it continues to be a problem I may drill some ventilation holes along the bottom.

I did make a few of my own modifications to the MAKE design:

• Instead of aluminum siding and cake pans I used 3" steel stove pipe sections and 6" stove pipe caps
• Instead of cork handles I used pieces of hardwood dowel
• Instead of ordinary steel wire I used some bike spokes we had laying around for the skewers
• Spokes as skewers work very well. They're threaded at one end, which makes putting the handles on easy as pie.

For a delicious marinade I've had great luck with marinating both beef and chicken in either of these for at least an hour before cooking:

• Asian sesame salad dressing mixed with soy sauce
• Sunflower Market's store brand soy sesame sauce

Next time I fire the thing up I'm going to use an intriguing local red chile jelly as a glaze, and I'm expecting it to be absolutely amazing.

NOTE: Some may be concerned about my use of galvanized steel. I'm under the impression that while it may release some mildly harmful fumes as the zinc burns off, I'm outside and it shouldn't be dangerous as far as the actual food goes. They make parts of the burners of some commercial grills out of galvanized steel, so it can't be too terrible. The FDA has also deemed galvanized steel safe for direct contact with non-acidic foods. So galvanized isn't as safe as stainless or aluminum would be, but I'm personally comfortable with it.

Why I'm back on Blogger

Well, after years and years of trying every home-brew and CMS-based idea I could think of for managing my blog -- and currently knee deep in building my own custom CMS with PHP and CodeIgniter -- I'm back to Blogger.

It might seem like an odd decision. I've got the skills to build anything I can possibly imagine, when it comes to a website. I'm handy in PHP and MySQL, passable in Python, and have even experimented with trying to power a blog with node.js -- probably because I'm some sort of freaky emotional masochist.

At the end of the day, though, what I really want is simple: A blog that always works.


Somewhere, somehow, I need to maintain a portfolio website. Something that really shows off what I can do both technically and aesthetically in print and on a screen, but that place doesn't need to be, and in fact probably shouldn't be the same as my blog.

You see: right now I've got several things that I really would like to blog about, but I can't. I don't want to put them up on my current blog, because I was planning on being about to migrate everything in it over to a new platform. I also can't put anything up on that new platform...because it isn't done yet.

It's a pain in the ass, and I don't want to deal with it any more.

So from now on, only my portfolio site will be a hotbed of cutting edge web design techniques and crazy programming experiments. I'm not looking for a job, so I can afford to let it be frequently zany and full of out-of-date content.

My blog, on the other hand, is a different can of worms. I only get one chance to be among the first makers to assemble a Yakitori grill based on the plans in the latest MAKE magazine. So to get that project out there fast I'll just use Blogger.

Stay tuned for content migration...it'll be fun.

Why to build a tiny house

Photo credit: RowdyKittens

Over the last several months our house has been a hotbed of countercultural lifestyle ideas. We've been all over the map trying to break out of the mold and plan something for our future that is just for us, and not driven by any cultural expectations of what a pair of 20-somethings in love are supposed to do.

First off, buying a regular house, and signing a mortgage that chains us to payments for most of the rest of our lives was right out. I feel trapped right now by still owing $11,000 on my car, and I can't even imagine the pressure of being indebted to the tune of six figures. Wage slavery? No thank you!

We originally planned on building a small earthbag house here in New Mexico, about 80 miles south of Albuquerque. We're not sure we want to stay in New Mexico forever though, and even if we do stay here forever my professional skills are certainly more suited to the kinds of jobs that are found in a city, not way out in the boondocks. Eighty miles is a long commute, and we don't want to trap ourselves in a situation where we have to do something like that.

Then I got a wild hair and decided that a biodiesel school bus turned RV was the future, and we spent quite some time and energy pondering plans to make a school bus into a home. They're just not tall enough though. The fact that the usable interior space is too short to accomodate a loft just makes it too hard to cram sleeping, eating, recreating and bathing for two into such a small space. A queen size bed is pretty big, and being 6'2" I really do need the length of a queen. A full just doesn't cut it.

Then a few weeks ago we watched this video interview with Jay Shafer of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company and it changed our world.



Once we watched this video it catalyzed all the thoughts I've been mulling over for the last few years into a compelling urgency to do this now. For the last few years I've been reading a lot: including Lloyd Kahn's Blog, theTiny House Blog, miss minimalist, social change through simple living (who I believe is the same RowdyKittens I snagged this post's photo from off Wikimedia Commons), The Tiny Life and a million other random blog posts and magazine articles and books about alternative building and the food supply network and consumerism and capitalism and self reliance and all the things that we all aspire to (even if some people do it in stupid ways).

I've lost my faith in the the average american dream house, and the average american dream along with it.

I thought I might sit down and spell out just why I want to build a tiny house, in the hopes I might inspire others to at least consider such a point of view. So here it goes, the big reasons I plan to build a tiny house:

Freedom

This is really the heart of it. I'm not just talking about the simple physical freedom of planting your home on wheels instead of a cement foundation. I'm talking about freedom from debt, freedom from the high maintenance costs of a large house, freedom from the freedom to accumulate all the shit that ties us down - in our hearts and our minds and our giant houses that double as warehouses for disused crap.

Money

There's the elephant in the room. We plan to save a lot of money by building a tiny house and making it our home. Rather than signing away the next few decades of our lives to a giant mortgage we will build our house ourselves, with a flat out up front investment that will likely (based on my initial estimates) cost under $20,000.

That's it, for less than many people spend on a car we'll have our own little 140 square foot slice of paradise. One that we could totally replace the roof on for a pittance if we ever need to. The lower maintenance costs of a smaller house are another enormous financial advantage.

Quality over Quantity

Instead of spending a small amount per square foot on a lot of shoddily built square feet we'd rather spend a lot per square foot - maybe over $150 - to make our tiny house as flawless and reliable as is humanly possible. Since we're not spending $100K to have 1000 square feet of den and living room and a funny room down a hall that's useless for anything we'll be able to afford the very best for every square inch.

Rather than have a 200 square foot kitchen with the cheapest decent looking fixtures and appliances the contractor can find we can have a 30 square foot kitchen with the highest quality fixtures and appliances we can possibly afford.

This will also help with maintenance costs. A $400 professional restaurant faucet is going to outlast any $150 fixture from Lowes.

Simplicity

Trimming the fat from our lives is one of the most important things a human being can do. Not being distracted by all the consumption-driven bullshit of society gives us more time to enjoy the small things that make our lives worthwhile. I assure you a sitting quietly with a loved one will make you happier than anything you can buy.

Building a tiny house is just the obvious progression once you start down the path of minimalism.

It's just the right thing to do

I was raised to ask one simple question of my lifestyle: "Could everyone on the planet do this?" The answer to that question on the topic of 3,000 square foot McMansions in sprawling suburban hell is a simple, unequivocal, thundering and resounding "NO." If you think I'm wrong about that, or think the question is inconsequential - I'm sorry. I can't help you.

There are 7 billion of us on this planet, and our free ride of cheap petrochemical energy is coming to end. Times are changing, and we can either change with them and move into a glorious new age of living consciously and using technology to make our lives easier, or we can keep chugging right along - working long hours at jobs we don't like, ignoring what really matters so we can buy crap we don't need and live in a house we don't use and drive a car we don't enjoy - until the whole mess collapses right on our decrepit heads.

Drip irrigation

 Yesterday we installed a pretty thorough drip irrigation system in both the front and back yards.

The front yard has about 40 feet of soaker hose covering the flowers outside the fence (finally, watering those was quite a chore) and a dripper doohicky for each of the 10 three sisters mounds. The back yard, with its 60 feet of corn rows just has a soaker hose down the top of each row.

Watering is a lot easier now, and I this should also help with weeds because we won't have as much excess water all over the place.

Installing it was pretty easy, even with the extra effort of burying the lines in the front yard so that the only exposed bits are the drippers above the mounds. The only part that was really time consuming or terribly strenuous was trenching the 50 feet or so needed to get from the spigot in the back yard to the corn along the back fence. I had forgotten how hard packed the back yard is...but now we have water the full length of it, ready to tap into wherever we might need it!

If you're considering a drip system I highly recommend it.

Newspaper seedling pot form

Over the weekend I also got some seedlings started indoors. Rather than going out and buying a bunch of those recycled paper pulp mini seedling pots I decided to make my own. Not only are the store-bought ones kind of expensive for what they are - I've never had much luck with them. The roots grow out of them slightly, but they don't come apart well if you try to plant the seedlings in the pots, but the roots grow into the sides enough that you hurt them trying to peel the pot off. It's a mess I didn't care to repeat this year.

I remembered seeing a little gadget in a catalog once for making seedling pots out of newspapers. It was just a wooden block with a round hole in it, and a plunger that fit into that hole. I figured it probably worked by wrapping newspaper around the plunger and sticking it in the hole. I also figured I didn't have to spend $25 on a piece of wood when I've got more pieces of wood than I know what to do with in a pile in my yard - not to mention the tools to turn them into just such a contraption.

Building it
So I took a hole saw (2-1/8" I think, whatever size is right for door knobs) and cut out the middle of an old 2x4, saving the plug that came out. Then I glued and screwed a flat piece of laminated plywood to the bottom of the block. The last step was cutting a piece off the end of an old mop handle and gluing and screwing it to the top of the plunger, giving myself a nice handle.

Using it
Using it is super easy. Just take a strip of newspaper about 3 inches wide, and at least 17 inches or so long, and wrap it around the plunger so that there's enough hanging over the bottom to fold down around it. Then stick it in the block and press down pretty hard. Turning the plunger helps, and you'll find that depending on which way you wrapped it, turning it the other way will loosen the paper's grip on the plunger, and press it against the inside of the block a little, making the next step easier.

Then pull the plunger out, but try to keep the paper in the block. This way you can stuff soil into it and it will keep its shape. Make sure to get your soil pretty moist first, as the moisture of the soil will help set the newspaper and keep the whole thing from unraveling when you pull it out.

And then you're done! Have a blast making your own seedling pots, and these will be even better than those crappy ones you buy in stores.

I made the thing itself and then constructed and planted 25 pots in under two hours, so I'm going to call it a massive win for frugal gardening.

Tree stump planter

We've got this stump in our front yard. It's partially hollow, and always spends the spring and summer incredibly full of Black Widow spiders. Last year we tried building a little trellis on top and growing beans up it. It was nicer looking, but only made the spider problem worse.

I fixed it yesterday though! Just a couple of boards affixed into the gap in the side with copper coated hanger strap, and then a few bucketfuls of dirt.

Then I ringed the top in rocks, which I varied the size of to level off the top.

Bam! Now what was a poisonous spider high-rise is now a very nice looking planter.