Potato Box Update 1

The potato box is now 4 levels high (~3 ft) with potatoes I planted in mid-May.  This means there is approximately 12 cubic feet of potato growing space in the box so far.

I still have 2 or 3 more levels to add to the box if the plants continue to grow.  The plants are starting to think about flowering, so I'm not sure how much more vertical growth I can expect.

Review - Cold Steel Sharkie

I recently ordered a Cold Steel Sharkie (manufacturer product site:  http://www.coldsteel.com/sharkies.html ).
Search Amazon.com for Cold Steel Sharkie

This is a short review of the product that may be helpful to someone who hasn't had a chance to handle one.  I know from my own experience that it was a little hard to picture exactly what this product would be like from just pictures of the marker alone.

The Sharkie is basically an over-sized Sharpie-like permanent marker.  The selling points are that it is not only significantly larger and heavier than the typical marker, but it is also made of much stronger material.

Here is the Sharkie compared with the Sharpie I carry every day.

According to Cold Steel, the marker body is made of glass-reinforced plastic called Grivory and has walls 4-times thicker than "similar markers."

It definitely has a very tough feel to it.  I don't plan to do any destructive testing on it any time soon, but it is a very solid chunk of plastic.  It also has a slightly rough texture which helps with a solid grip.  It is not slick plastic at all.

I have fairly large hands and the Sharkie has a solid feel when grasped in a fist and a serious chunk of marker extends beyond the fist.

So, in addition to being a nice fat marker that isn't going to break in your pocket or bag, it has potential as a self-defense tool for times and places where more lethal tools are not available.

Cold Steel mentions in their own product description that the Sharkie can be used as a Yawara stick.

This thing would be great for hammerfist strikes.  It also becomes a fist load weapon by nicely filling in the interior of the fist and adding some amount of mass.  My one sample was 67 grams (over 2 ounces).

Note that it is NOT designed to be a stabbing weapon with the cap off and the more slender writing tip exposed.

1. The heavy-duty cap is attached with heavy-duty threads.  It takes several turns of the cap to remove it.
2. The writing tip is not extra reinforced.  It is probably as strong as any Sharpie, but it does not have a metal tip or any metal reinforcement.
3. The heavy-duty cap can not be reattached to the butt end of the marker like on the typical Sharpie.  You can not push the cap or screw the cap onto the other end of the marker to extend the length of the tool with the writing tip exposed.

One last thing I noted:  the markings (e.g., the shark mouth, the SHARKIE label) are very, very durable.  I thought I would take a little scrub pad and rub the image and the lettering off of the marker (just to make it even more clear that this is nothing more than a fat marker as far as anyone else needs to know).  Well... rubbing the marker down with a scrub pad that would have taken rust off of steel did nothing to remove the lettering off of the Sharkie.  In fact, it did nothing to the marker body at all -- no scratches, no roughening of the texture.  I could have tried some really coarse sandpaper or taken it to the bench grinder, but again I only have one of these and I don't plan on doing any destructive testing on it at this time.

Search Amazon.com for Cold Steel Sharkie

Disclosure:  I have no relationship with Cold Steel other than purchasing some of their products through a 3rd party.  I was not compensated by the manufacturer in any way for this review.

Potato Box

I finally got around to building a potato box this week.  This has been on my to-do list all year, but has been forgotten or out-prioritized until this week.

I am way behind schedule for planting potatoes here in Georgia, but I am going to give them a shot anyway.  I won't have too much time or effort invested, even if they fail.

If nothing else, this will have me better prepared for an earlier start next year.

This is a variation of growing potatoes in a stack of tires or any other approach where the container containing the potato plants is expanded (primarily vertically) as the potato plants grow.  This allows for a larger harvest from the same set of plants.  [At least for some types of potatoes -- I've heard that early season varieties, such as Yukon Gold, do not continue to set fruit throughout the season and so this tower approach would be wasted on them.  I wasn't planning to grow any early season varieties anyway.]

The old school way to do this would be with a mound and "hilling" the mound larger as the plants grow.

My only reason for building this was to avoid having another plastic container in the yard (more for the neighbors benefit than mine).

Materials:

6 8-ft 1x8"

2 12-ft 2x2" (this was more than necessary)

construction screws

stain

There were no detailed plans or set requirements here.  The construction could have been with 1x6 or 1x10 or 1x 12 lumber -- or even 2x8 instead of 1x8, etc. -- but the 1x8 seemed to be the most cost-effective for building a tower roughly 4 feet tall.

An expensive long-lasting wood like cedar or redwood would probably be ideal for this.  I went with just cheap white pine and gave it a cedar-colored stain to provide it some water protection and make it look a little nicer.  It won't last forever this way, but I am betting it will make it through a few seasons.

The basic construction is just a series of simple 2x2 ft boxes built in a way where the individual boxes are fairly solid and then they are capable of stacking up one above the other in a tower which is also reasonably solid.  Nothing fancy.

Tools were nothing more than a circular saw for cutting the lumber to length and a screwdriver or drill for driving the construction screws.  A chop saw would have made it easier to make all the cuts, but a circular saw was what I had available.

I stained the pine first.  It is an oil-based stain and will bead water on the wood after it is applied.  It is not exactly an "all-natural" product, but it is probably better than using pressure treated lumber.  I have used the same product on my raised beds and haven't had any problems with it.

After staining I lined the boards up side by side so I could mark the cutting lines across multiple boards all at once.  Again, a chop saw with a little jig would have made this even easier, but I'm not building anything fancy -- cutting by hand with the circular saw is fine.

After cutting the 1x8s into 2-ft lengths and cutting the 2x2s into 7-in lengths, I got the stain back out to stain the freshly cut ends of the lumber.

Next came construction of the boxes.

This is the first completed box.  Note that it is upside down in this picture.  And the plywood is just the base I am building on, it doesn't have anything to do with the construction.

The second box was built right on top of the first box, but it is not attached (other than by friction) to the first box.

The tower is complete.  Note the yard stick for a rough indication of the height of the tower.  Boxes are still upside down.

All of the completed boxes (right-side up for the first time).

And finally getting down to business with the first box set in place, leveled, soil added, and seed potatoes planted.

I saw someone doing potato container gardening in perlite, which kept the potatoes nice and clean (no dirt on them).  But that required very regular feeding of the plants (because the perlite  is basically sterile and does not contain nutrients) and I didn't want to mess with regular feeding.

It occurred to me when I was about 75 percent done with the whole thing that I may have made boxes fit together too tightly.  I'm wondering if the boxes that are filled with potting soil and exposed to the rain, etc. might swell enough to make it challenging to stack additional boxes on top later.  I guess I'll find out in a month or so when I am (hopefully) adding a new box to the stack.

Anyway, the potato box is certainly not any sort of finely-crafted woodwork, but my goal was to have something better looking than another plastic container in the yard and I think this tower of boxes will accomplish that.

I think for the next one I may go with a 3'x3' box rather than 2'x2'.  The larger box would be more expensive for the materials, but would require almost no additional effort to build and deploy compared with the smaller box.  A 3'x3'x4' tower would have more than double the volume of the 2'x2'x4' tower.  Maybe it would help produce more than double the amount of potatoes...

New Blog Begins

We have so much going on this year that I wanted to start capturing some of the more interesting projects. 

This year we are shopping for rural land to create a larger, better homestead, but we are also putting work into our current suburban home. Some things underway right now are

• create ~240 sq ft of protected storage space under the front porch
• a major french drain project
• building rainwater catchment systems
• starting a new garden bed
• starting new container gardening
• driveway expansion
• converting a garage to a new bedroom

... and that is just a partial list. I also intend to write an occasional product review for interesting items that we purchase and use.

For a short time I will be evaluating both TypePad and Blogger, so there may be some duplicate content on them.  Choosing a home for a long-term blog is also on the to-do list.