Years ago I had a bike. Not the greatest bike, just an inexpensive bike from a department store. I actually went through a couple of those bikes but they helped me get around during college. After several years now of not having I bike I decided I wanted to get back into shape and ride bikes more. Although not prepared to spend a whole lot I did find an affordable — folding — bike at citizenbike.com. The bike arrived today!
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After unfolding and checking the tires I took a quick spin around the streets nearby before heading off to the library. I wanted to check out the new trails nearby. I thought I could do a route sticking to the trails that would loop around to the library. Unfortunately they haven’t actually completed the entire trail connection yet.
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I was already feeling my muscles complain about the unaccustomed activity so I turned around, back-tracked and went a different route. After the quick stop at the library I headed home by the short route. Altogether the first ride ended up being 00:49:58 according to my stopwatch. The whole distance was a little over four miles, I think. I have a bicycle computer ordered so that should give me better figures once it arrives. In the meantime I’ll have to get used to riding a bike again. My muscles and my seat are all feeling the exercise.
Straw!
Yesterday we went out and picked up a straw bale for the porch garden. At the farm supply store the fellow brought the bale around on a fork lift and immediately headed towards the SUV belonging to another customer. We pointed out that the VW New (Biodiesel) Beetle was ours and his eyes grew very wide. He was very surprised that we were going to put it in the back of the Beetle. It fit just fine.
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Back home we stashed the bale in our storage closet and started mulching the Red Norland potatoes. The plan with all of the potatoes is to keep building up the straw so that the potatoes grow up vertically in the cage. We’ll be wrapping the cages as they grow to contain the straw (and potatoes). At least that’s the plan. It’ll be interesting to see how the experiment works out. We’ll also use the straw to mulch around the other plants.
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I also planted more plants today. I put in seeds for the zucchini, yellow squash, basil, oregano and more strawberries.
New Plants
The porch garden is busy growing. We had a couple colder mornings recently but mostly the weather has been good including days up over 70 degrees. The garlic and kale has been growing well.
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The potatoes are coming up. Right now only the Red Norland potatoes are actually up but the peanut fingerlings are on the way and I’d guess the others won’t be too far behind. We’re going to need to get the straw soon.
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We’ve also got flowers up now. Marigolds and nasturtiums.
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In the greenhouse it looks like the alpine strawberries have made a good start. They’ve just come up. I’ve got them out in the sun this afternoon but we’ll put them back in the greenhouse for the night. I’m going to need to start the summer plants soon. The broccoli is going to have to come out too, it is trying to just go to seed.
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Electricity Use
Over the last month we managed to bring down our electricity use quite a lot. Mostly we’ve just been better about turning things off and minimizing use of the heaters when they aren’t really needed. We still use more than I’d like but we only have a few more options to reduce usage in the apartment. We can’t replace the appliances with more energy-efficient models. That’ll have to wait until we’re in our own place. Even so our average use went down to 26.31 kWh/day from 32.53 kWh/day. I think we can reduce that further since we still did have some use of the heaters. The average temperature was a bit warmer 47 degrees vs. 43 degrees the previous period. Puget Sound Energy provides a variety of tools to graph and analyze energy usage which are useful.
We’ll continue to try to improve our power savings. We’ve also talked about ‘power-out’ evenings when we simply won’t use things like the television and read instead. It’s amazing to think about the difference between the average home running 20-40 kWh/day to an off-grid home running 4-6kWh/day. That’s a big difference but home design, efficient appliances, non-electric cooking, etc. can all make it work.
The Potatoes Strike Back!
After our mistake in identifying potatoes (don’t laugh) the potatoes are actually coming up now. So far only a couple varieties are up or the dirt is clearly lifting as they push up through but I’d expect the others won’t be far behind. We’ve had a few cold nights which probably slowed things a bit. Now that they’re actually coming up we’ll need to go get the straw and be ready to start mulching the potatoes. We’re going to try to grow them as if they were in a barrel. The cage will be wrapped and as they grow taller we’ll continue adding straw. Ideally this will let the potatoes grow up vertically through the straw and produce more potatoes than we’d get otherwise. It’s an interesting experiment so we’ll have to see how it works.
Other than the potatoes our first nasturtiums are up as well.
One potato, two potatoes, No potatoes
Well… what we thought were potatoes coming up weren’t potatoes at all. I still think they’ll be up soon but the seedlings we saw actually turned out to be maple trees. Those whirly seeds end up all over the place. I had tried picking them out of the containers but some obviously made it into the dirt. Or the squirrels buried them in the container. They do like to try to bury things in the containers. Cleaning them out I’ve found peanuts and even a walnut.
