So I know that my last post promised a story, with some physics. It’s coming, but I must admit to having been distracted this morning by a bit of long-overdue tending of the garden. For those of you out there who might be wondering how the garden’s doing, especially after my description of my irrigation solutions in a previous post, here’s a look at today’s harvest:

Contents: tomatoes (3 varieties), cucumbers (2), courgettes (3), mint (2), basil (2), lemons, and limes.

I’m very excited, relieved, and pleased! So being on the road for so long was not too bad for the garden (although I lost several tomatoes and cucumbers due to over-ripening).

-cvj

Sunday – Los Angeles! Back at last! But only for 20 hours. I flew in from Durham and touched down at 2:00pm Pacific time, having left there at 5:30 am local time. I’ve got to get a taxi, get home, put everything into the washing machine, grab the hiking boots and other gear, and repack. Got to go to my office and deal with some paperwork. But most urgently, I have to go and check on the garden (hence the misleading title of this post).

One of the drawbacks of summer travel as an academic is that it ruins ones garden. I left at the beginning of July with a nice arrangement of tender young vegetable plants about a foot tall. Tomatoes (six varieties), peppers (two varieties), cucumbers (two varieties, eight plants), zucchini (=corgettes; two varieties, four plants), runner beans (four plants), and string beans (four plants). Those are the main ones anyway.

In anticipation of being away for four weeks in Durham and another three away at another workshop (see next post), I spent several days designing and building a drip irrigation system that runs under the surface of the ground and drip drip drip drips away for a little while each evening. I spent several hours crawling under the house (rather like in the recent scary movie “The Descent”, but without the creatures and the rockfall…go see it) running wires to set up a centralised electronic controller of the values that connect the entire system to the water main.

This was to stop everything being fried by the heat in my absence, while not placing undue burdens of duty on my busy wife, who’ll be going to her own conferences, (more…)