wurple.net

Following a double lap of around 52km around the local hills on Saturday, I was feeling a bit too tired to hit Lysterfield on the MTB. Since I couldn’t cycle, I figured that I might as well do something bike related around the house.

I’ve been using the Delta Botticelli for some time now. It’s not too bad a system, especially for the price I paid. Sufficiently stable. Keeps the bikes off each other. The problem is that you either need to put the darn thing in the middle of the room to be able to access all of the bikes easily. Alternatively, if you put it near a wall, put the two bikes with the skinniest handlebars or that you ride the least, against the wall.

I chose to go for the second option. Not too bad, but still, not an ideal situation.

Oh… and the other major failing of this system for my purposes is that I have five bikes.

Anyway, I made myself busy on Sunday afternoon with some hooks, wood, bolts and a power drill to end up with this.

For those who are interested in doing something similar, I used a horizontal spacing of 30cm between each mount. Don’t ask me how that spacing works when my widest handlebars are 68cm, because it just does. I’ve also offset each of the mounts to reduce the amount of seat/handlebar overlap. If I did it again, I’d get a wider piece of wood so that I could get more offset, but this seems to work fine. For the mount, I used a 35mm deep piece of outdoor pine mounted to the wall with four Dynabolts (rated at 70kg each).

Pretty pleased with this actually because it actually makes my tiny garage look more spacious. It’s also allowed me to hang all of my five bikes and given me visitor parking or *cough*roomtogrow*cough.

So after two rather warm days around the 30ºC mark, my tomato plant seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I’m sure it received some greywater from the kitchen and worm tea, but despite this, the leaves still appear to be withering slightly. Slightly cooler weather over the next few days should hopefully help and I might also divert a bit more water that direction.

Meanwhile, the lettuce still appears to be coming along nicely. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but I’d swear that some of the lettuce has actually added some significant size since I last wrote about this on Sunday.

I should really take some photos… maybe tomorrow.

When I moved into my place about 8 months ago, my backyard was a mess of weeds. Not surprising, given that the place had been unoccupied for over three months.

Underneath the mass of weeds however was a neat little entertaining area and a couple of garden beds. The soil seemed pretty decent – nice dark colour and fairly loose. The plan was always to plant some fresh fruits and veg, but with all of the other house stuff going on, there wasn’t really much of an opportunity to do so.

Recently however, I got around to planting a few things.

Now despite the fact that I tend to have an answer for most things, I will admit that when it comes to gardening, I know zip. What better way to learn than to practice?

First up, I planted a grape tomato plant and a jalapeno chilli plant. I got both of these at about 20cm tall in tubes and have got them in one of the sunniest spots in the backyard. A couple of weeks in, The tomato plant is shooting up and is starting to flower. Little buds are starting to show on the chilli plant too.

More recently, I also planted a couple of lettuce plants. Now I love my leafy lettuce salads, but the problem is that I living alone, I have a hard time keeping lettuce fresh in the fridge. So what better way to get fresh salad than from my own lettuce patch? So I picked up a couple of mixed salad punnets and now a week in, they seem to be coming along nicely.

The good thing about all of this is that I finally have a use for my worm tea. Now my worm farm isn’t exactly super productive when it comes to castings and tea, but invariably, I do end up with some worm tea. So far it’s just going into whatever plants I have, however with the addition of the vegies, all of the tea has been redirected.

It will still be a few weeks before I can harvest anything, but everything appears to be going pretty well at the moment. We’ll see how things go as the weather really heats up in January.