In this post I’ll describe our build process for our square foot garden.
Materials:
- 2 2x10x8 untreated boards
- 20+ 3” wood screws
- 4 7” pieces 2x4 for reinforcing corners
- 6 bags composted cow manure (cow poop)
- 1 compressed bag peat moss
- 2 small bags perlite + 3 small bags vermiculite
- 3 bags top soil
The build process is relatively straightforward. You will be building a square. First 
you will need to cut each of the 2x10s in half. Once the boards have been cut you will need to secure them together with the 3” wood screws. After completing the initial join used small 7” pieces of 2x4 to reinforce the joints. Once the box is built you can stain the outside to help it blend in with your landscaping if you wish. We had some old stain laying around and after a couple of coats the boards looked much more appealing than the blond pine. One addition we made to the box design was to staple some sheets of landscape cloth to the bottom of the box. We did this for 2 reasons: 1) to prevent soil from seeping out under the edges 2) to prevent unwanted plants from growing up into the soil from the bottom.
Lacking a 10+ cubic foot blender we used a tarp on the drive way to mix the soil ingredients together. We used a slight variation to Mel’s Mix detailed on the Square Foot Gardening website. I could not find the coarse vermiculite, so I used 3 bags fine vermiculite (all the store had) and 2 bags perlite. After filling the box I felt we needed just a little more soil so we added several generic bags of top soil from the local nursery.
The final step before planting is to lay out a grid. I drove 3 screws into each side of the box to allow me to create a grid using basic garden twine. 
Once the screws were driven into the sides I ran the first set of lines. As I ran the second set of lines I made sure that as each of the new lines crossed the original lines I wrapped the new line around the existing to make a tight join.
With our square foot garden built and in place it was now time to choose the plants we would be growing. My next post will review the plants we choose and how we laid them out in the grid.
This will be the first of what I hope to be several posts related to my families experiences gardening in a small grid. We are not expert gardeners, in particular we aren’t experts with the method of gardening we are choosing to utilize. I hope our experiences may just prove useful to someone else living in an urban environment that desires to have a slightly larger garden than the pots and containers were allowing us to have.
After reading Scott Hanselmans’s recent post on sq. ft. gardening and then reviewing the thorough documentation found on the square foot gardening website my family and I decided to build a sq. ft. garden yesterday. We have been wanting a “better” garden for years, but given our current home’s location and lack it’s lack of sunny backyard flower beds we thought we’d never get to have a larger garden. Our first house had a small back yard, but there was 1 corner of that yard that got sun 8+ hours a day and had great soil, so we were spoiled. Our next two homes did not have locations like that, and we missed the yields that original garden produced. We have also recently had our first child and wanted to involve her in gardening because we both had fond memories of fresh vegetables from the garden as children. The sq. ft. garden seems to have answered our needs: 1) it is small and self contained 2) if built with aesthetics in mind it can be placed in your front yard without corrupting your curb appeal entirely 3) there seems to be a small community of people working to improve the art that we can learn from.
I do want to mention that sq. ft. gardening will also appeal to geeks and other analytical folks as it’s all based on an orderly grid of plants, with each grid only containing that which it can support. I guess it’s sort of the Matrix of gardens.
In my next post I will discuss the building of our sq. ft. garden complete with pictures of the build process. So far this project has been extremely fun; my daughter has gotten her hands dirty and to the chagrin of her mom and I has learned the phrase “Cow Poop” (the soil we crated used composted cow manure, and not remembering that she is currently learning words in a rapid fashion we told her the compost contained “Cow Poop”). Live and learn.
Our finished garden: TwitPic
This past X-Mas Santa brought me a netbook for being such a “good'” boy (developer). After much deliberation both Santa and I settled on the Dell Mini 9. No one netbook was perfect in my opinion, but the Mini was the choice I went with.
The Good: The device is SMALL, it is truly a toss around laptop (I have had it on the beach, the yard, planes, and to the chagrin of my wife the bed). I immediately upgraded my mini to 2GB RAM and installed XP PRO. The device is plenty snappy; even when running multiple applications. The screen is sharp, with the built in memory card reader it’s a great travel companion when you want to watch moves on the plane. It’s even come in handy while onsite with clients allowing me to RDP into servers and run SQL statements from remote locations with in the building.
The Bad: Do not plan on writing war and peace with this device, you will not be happy. The keyboard is small and the layout leaves a good deal to be desired. The device could have been build a little more solid, after playing with a friends HP Mini, I certainly consider the Dell mini the cheaper feeling product.
The mini is not, in my opinion, a good choice for your primary laptop, it just can’t deliver from a typing perspective and the screen is a little too small once you’ve been spoiled with larger resolution displays. It is great as a second laptop; however, this does come with a dilemma “How do you keep your data synchronized between primary and secondary machine”. I use a couple different programs to keep my data synchronized: MS One Note and Groove. Now let me first state that I don’t keep everything synchronized, since I’m using this device as a “secondary” laptop, it doesn’t need to have everything. I just want my latest docs and my most recent notes. Groove and OneNote suffice for synchronizing this sort of information.
Already the new netbooks seem to have better keyboards, more power and slightly larger displays. With pending release Windows 7 this area of the market should be extremely interesting to watch. I’m sure in the next 6 months there will be several more machines for us all to covet.
It’s not every day I get to combine two of my interests (technology and fitness); although more and more options present themselves every day. Back in November I purchased the Polar FT80 for my wife and I to help us maintain our fitness levels during the up coming holiday season. I will not say the watch is glitch free, just go to the forums and you’ll see that does have it’s share of issues, but as far as I’m concerned the watch’s benefits far out weigh it’s negative attributes. The FT80 allows you to upload it’s data to a special polar training site where you can review your workouts graphically and numerically; you can also track your progress towards various goals. Both the watch and the website can develop plans for you based on your goals and fitness level, the watch will track your weekly progress towards these goals and award you visually if you attain a certain percentage of the goals requirements (a little cheesy, but fun none the less). The watch can run various tests on your heart including rest tests and own index tests with the results of these tests it will further hone your program. The own index calculation is Polar’s estimate of your VO2 max, and like other data points it will be stored each time you run the test so that you can track improvements. The FT80 also comes standard with the Polar WearLink transmitter belt, which is much more comfortable than the standard hard plastic chest straps their older models used to come with. All in all this is a solid watch and training companion.
I was inspired by the well known Lazy List implementation and decided to create a Lazy Object generic type. There may be better ways to do this, but I thought that a Lazy Object would be a good way to handle the Many To One situations, just as the Lazy List handles the One To Many situations. With out further ado, here is my Lazy Object code:
public class Lazy<T>
{
private IQueryable<T> query;
public Lazy(IQueryable<T> query)
{
this.query = query;
}
public T Get()
{
return query.SingleOrDefault();
}
}
A recent project of mine had me creating a very basic contact form for a simple marketing website. It just so happens that shortly after creating the contact form I had to use a contact form on Ryan Lanciaux's blog and was impressed with the fact that when I received a response from Ryan, his email contained the country that my IP originated from (I know... such a simple thing impressed me). I now had to figure out how to add some of this sweetness to my own simple contact form. I found a couple of different methods for getting country [state] information from an IP and finally settled on a method that utilized the hostip.info website/database. The hostip website allows you to get the data in a couple different ways, you can get raw text (which my sample demonstrates); you can also get an XML data dump that includes lat/long. Here is a very basic method that can be used to get country and state information for an IP address:
private string GetCountryStateForIP(string ip)
{
try
{
//http://api.hostip.info/?ip=12.215.42.19
string ipUrl = "http://www.hostip.info/api/get.html?ip="
+ ip;
WebClient webClient = new WebClient();
Byte[] ipInfoBytes = webClient.DownloadData(ipUrl);
UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
string ipInfo = encoding.GetString(ipInfoBytes);
return string.Format("IP: {0} {1}Data: {2}",
ip, Environment.NewLine, ipInfo);
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
return string.Format("IP: {0} {1}Error: {2}",
ip, Environment.NewLine, ex.Message);
}
}
The comment in the code above contains the URL that will return the XML feed. My goal is to create a more robust method that gathers latitude and longitude information. I would actually like to go as far as to then take that latitude and longitude and generate a link to that location using Google Maps.
I will be running the Chicago Marathon on October 12th 2008 in support of the Alzheimer's Assocations's Team CARE. As part of Team CARE I am earning money to support the fight against Alzheimer's. Please check out my site: http://www.fencerowproductions.com/frp/meacha/
Let me start this post by acknowledging the fact that I drank the MS cool aid years ago. My job depends on MS and my home runs on MS, other than the obligatory iPod and Blackberry my life revolves around MS operating systems. That being said, this week I embraced a relatively new MS OS/product, the Windows Home Server (WHS). I chose HP's implementation of the Home Server, the EX475 (MediaSmart Server). I am very impressed with this product, so far it appears to deliver upon it's claims of being a very simple home backup/data repository solution. I was compelled to move to the WHS after the birth of my daughter, and the realization that we had 1000s of pictures that I couldn't stand to lose. We limped along for over a year with scripts on several servers copying data from one machine to the next to ensure I had very basic redundancy. The rub was the dependability of the scripts. I wanted a solution that just worked and provided inherent redundancy. So far I have all 4 of my computers backing up nightly to the WHS, I also have all our data stored on the shares which are set to duplicate the data across the WHS drives. I am looking forward to the Power Pack update, which should correct and enhance the WHS system.
I created a small BlogEngine.NET extension that allows you to generate a thumbnail image on the fly and display the generated image within the post. The extension also links the thumbnail image to the full sized image so that a user can go directly to the full size image if they wish. Example:
[IMG FILE=Images/walking_small.jpg SIZE=200]
Syntax: "[IMG FILE=Images/walking_small.jpg SIZE=200]"
Download Extension: ImgThumbGen.cs (6.01 kb)
Two brothers are taking on the 99 Problems Site using Microsoft's F# Language, http://www.frickinsweet.com/99problems/. Not only do they have a great title "I've Got 99 Problems... but a glitch ain't one", but so far it seems they are taking time to explain their solutions to the problems and ask the general public to contribute to the creation of truly elegant solutions. I'm going to make it a point to check this site often to see how they are progressing, perhaps I'll even try to solve some the the 99 problems myself (it's never bad to learn a new language, particularly one that is so different from my standard OO languages).