A mallet made from wood pruned from backyard trees

A year or two or three ago, I pruned one of my Australian brush cherry trees, and had a few forearm-sized logs lying around. Recently I saw an episode of The Woodwrights Shop where Roy makes a mallet. It's a perfect match: the short piece of a random log becomes the head, and a slightly less short piece of cork oak (from a tree I planted in about 1987) becomes the handle.

Usually one wants longer, straight logs, but for a mallet, short pieces are good enough, so it doesn't matter if the logs aren't very straight.

The brush cherry is clearly a dense wood - one notices immediately that even a seasoned piece is rather heavy. Upon working it, it becomes clear that it's also quite hard. Mortising the hole took a lot of effort, especially lacking a mallet to drive the 1 inch chisel. (I simply used another random length of long I had lying around - again wood from the same tree that's the source of the mallet's head.)

I've left the handle slightly oversized, since it might not have finished doing all the shrinking it's ever going to do. Maybe in a year or 10 I'll bring it down to final size so that so much of it doesn't stand proud of the head:

The taper is quite visible on the handle, and when I make another mallet (a bigger one - this is just a baby) I might use a more acute angle. On the other hand, the rather strong taper makes it easy to knock down the mallet if I want to, yet is gentle enough that the mallet doesn't spontaneously disassemble in use:

This little mallet seems perfectly capable of doing its job. It's light enough to not be tiring to use, and the lightness permits better control than a more anvil-like model would. But I can foresee a need for a heavier, anvil-like mallet. Something to drive a 1 inch chisel to mortise some extra-hard wood. That would've come in handy while making this junior mallet.

Biltong cabinet

A few days after Christmas I noticed silverside beef going for R50/kg at Pick n Pay, so I bought some, figuring that I'd make biltong out of it. Only one problem: I didn't have a biltong cabinet! What I do have is wood and tools with which to work it. So off to the garage I went and found two scraps that seemed just right to become the frame of my biltong cabinet-to-be. What became the top and bottom was an oak plank I bought for R10, and the side pillars came from a random piece of oak I think I found in my garage when I moved into my house. The random piece from the garage has come full circle; here I'm gluing it onto the cabinet top and bottom with some dowels for a better joint:

Gluing the biltong cabinet frame together

Gluing it up was a bit tricky at first, because the frame was so wobbly at first. But once the first pillar was glued and set, the others followed more easily. I use a loop of webbing tied loosely around the article I'm gluing, and then twist the loop with a stick to tighten it, finally locking the stick with another random piece of wood so the webbing doesn't untwist.

Because I was in a rush, I simply lined the inside of the frame with one contiguous piece of fabric. I want to redo the lining, and install a door in one of the side panels. The current access (through a hole sawn in the top, which also holds the ATX PSU fan) is very inconvenient. Also, the holes I drilled for installing the skewers from which the meat hangs are perpendicular to the pillar's face. Because the plan of the cabinet is not square, these skewer holes aren't collinear, which makes it difficult to impossible to install the loaded skewers into the cabinet. (I ended up poking holes through the fabric just to be able to install the skewers.)

Still, the cabinet does its job: it keeps insects out while allowing air movement past the drying meat, and despite several days of rain, my strips of silverside dried quite nicely. It took about a week for the meat to become recognizably biltong-ish.

A cross-eyed stereogram of the cabinet in operation

I ran the fan when I remembered to put the PV panel in the Sun; the panel is a bit too big for the little fan; its maximum-power output voltage is 15V (at 0.46A) while the fan only wants to draw 0.2A at 12V, to the fan gets overdriven somewhat. So far it has survived the abuse.

Building a furnace

I'm building a little furnace for backyard foundry duty, so I can cast parts for some of my zillion other hobbies. I'm not happy with all the brute-force furnaces out there on the Internet, that achieve all their melting power with a MOAR PROPANE! mentality, so I want mine to be one of those virtuous circle devices that work better the harder they work. Enter the air preheater:

Those holes in the side wall are air channels, for the incoming air to soak up some heat from the furnace wall instead of just letting it sink to ambient, unused. Unfortunately the side wall didn't slip out of the bucket as cleanly as I had hoped, and some fireclay got stuck in the corner, breaking out of the bottom of the wall when I turned the bucket over:

I'm glad the channels ended up mostly where I wanted them - parallel to the inside wall right to the bottom. (I made a little jig to help me line up the steel rod, that I used to make the channels, with the inner wall.)

Next I need to build a floor for this furnace, again with internal channels to communicate with the ones in the side wall. A roof might be nice too, but that can be (has to be) a separate part. I probably won't put air channels in the roof, in order to avoid plumbing problems - and so it will be possible to run this furnace without its roof.

Owning a home is sometimes like owning a white elephant

If you're considering buying a house, don't let yourself get carried away by the romance of owning the roof above your head, of being regent in your own castle. Sure, that's all a nice position to be in, but it isn't free. You get to choose how to keep the forces of entropy at bay: pay someone to do it for you, or DIY. I choose DIY, as that's the only ideologically acceptable option for a stingy bastard like me.

This post may sound a bit whiny, and you may be tempted to roll your eyes and mutter, "First world problems!" This is true - I wouldn't seriously consider giving up living in a house even if the workload were doubled. In fact, I like the unkempt look and wouldn't be too troubled by conceding some battles to the forces of entropy. My reasons for doing yard work at all have more to do with enjoying the meandering workout that it gives me than with having a home magazine-worthy garden. Think of the whining here as hyperbole. I'm looking for things to complain about in this post.

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A tangle of branches and stems cut from my Brazilian pepper tree. A season or two ago the Wisteria would have been the source of a tangled heap like this one.

I have at least three distinct compost heaps in my garden. This one is probably fastest, likely due to the fact that I feed it clippings from my shredder, and probably also due in part to my feeding it a dilute solution of urea at night. It's nice not to have to buy compost, but they do take up a fair amount of space.

I collect heaps of plant matter on my stoep until I have enough for a session with the shredder. The two far heaps will go on the compost heap pictured above, while the one next to my dog will require some alternative treatment. They're cuttings from my lavender bushes, and they smell quite strongly of camphor, which I suspects upsets the critters in the compost heap. (An earlier batch of lavender cuttings took forever to rot to an appreciable degree.)

The Brazilian pepper tree branches that are too thick to put through the shredder become firewood after a year or more. (It takes a while for the wood to become dry enough to burn without excessive smoke.) It's surprising how much firewood a few pruned branches can yield.

My driveway is covered with pebbles, but over the years (starting before I moved in, four years ago) the pebbles have become compacted into the soil below. It's likely that the principal cause of this is the lack of a plastic sheet below the pebbles. As a result, weeds (and other welcome, but unintended plants) grow in the middle where car tyres don't squish them.

The Brush Cherry on the left likes to scrape against my car, so I have to prune it back now and then.

The gate motor has been giving trouble since the start. Its favourite party trick is to open the gate, then to refuse to close it again for several minutes, and when it finally does, to give up halfway and claim that the battery is "faulty".

The wooden postbox swells in winter, so as to become difficult to open by pulling on the sliding bolt. The handle, of course, has broken off years ago when I had left the postbox door open to dry, and then absent-mindedly opened the gate, ramming the handle and bending the bolt holding it to the door. When I tried to bend the bolt straight, the handle broke right off.

My plum tree has suffered a sever split sometime in its lifetime. Judging by its stem it must be a rather old tree - certainly several decades old. One stem fell to the left in this picture, where it seems to have rooted and become essentially a second tree. The other leans quite precariously to the right, and it may be only a matter of time before it, too, falls.

I tend to get entangled in the plum tree's branches when I'm in the triangular area bordered by the low fence. So I don't go there often, and as a result weeds grow freely. This area is full of pebbles, so it isn't really suited for expanding my vegetable garden. To do so, I'd first want to sieve the pebbles out. But doing so requires being inside the plum tree triangle, and getting entangled... so I haven't (yet).

The wall in the background is new. The reason for its being new deserves a whole post of its own. The racist jerk builders (the neighbours picked them) who did the work left bits and pieces of rubble (pictured further below) in the area, which I collect as I find it.

A swimming pool is a pleasant luxury in the peak of summer, but I have strong doubts whether it's worthwhile having one. Maybe if one has kids (I don't).

A swimming pool eats chlorine. You get to choose in which form you feed it chlorine (okay, or maybe ozone), but unless you hulk out on a miniature wetland, you're going to have to keep it disinfected and clear of algae. I haven't optimized my pool, so it costs me about R400 per month in granular chlorine and electricity in the height of summer. (Far less - maybe half - in winter.)

Summer is also the season of almost daily topping up the unoptimized pool. On a hot windy day I can lose a centimeter or more.

The leaf skimmer has broken off the inlet port twice now, presumably when the aquabot bumped into it when the hose was long enough to let it reach. Pool parts are surprisingly expensive for what amounts to a small bit of PVC. I suspect there's just not enough competition in the local pool market to allow a significant consumer surplus.

Speaking of consumer surplus, the price of a new aquabot is more than I'm willing to pay. Mine broke: the lead ballast finally wore through the bottom part of the aquabot body, allowing the ballast to fall out, which left the aquabot as a whole buoyant. That caused it to float at the surface, doing its little chup-chup-chup dance with nothing but water and air to suck at.

Aside: does anyone know what aquabot body parts are made of? It seems too flexible to be PVC, but I don't know how to identify this plastic material reliably enough to know how to patch up the worn-through part.

With no aquabot in action, some leaves accumulate at the bottom. I sweep them around with the pool brush regularly, and eventually they find their way close enough to the weighed-down end of the pool hose that they get sucked into the weir basket. I'll have to fix the aquabot quite soon now, before summer, as this mitigatory practice will not suffice when the algae can photosynthesize with abandon.

One windy winter's night I heard a "swoosh" from outside. The following morning I discovered that that's the sound a bougainvillea makes when it falls over. I cut nearly all of it back, and I'm undecided whether I should keep it at all. The only reason I haven't yet removed it completely is that one stem still seems secure and healthy, and it's very pretty when it blossoms.

Unfortunately a bougainvillea has thorns, which makes it a nasty plant to work with. I simply left the cuttings where I dropped them, next to the deck, and simply burned them after a braai. That way I didn't have to fight the thorns to get the branches into the shredder - the opening to my fireplace is much, much larger (and hence more permissive) than the orifice leading to the shredder's blades.

Do you like ivy? Or Virginia creeper? I think they're pretty too, but my oh my are they aggressive plants. I decided rather to clear the back garden wall completely than to have to fight these plants season after season. They're tricky to get into the shredder though: the ivy because the bulk of the stems are so soft, and the creeper because it gets so entangled with itself.

When I moved in, the Virginia creeper had covered nearly the entire north wall of my house. It had attached itself to the eaves of the roof and from there had grown between the gutter and fascia boards, and even under the roof tiles into the roof space. Last year I decided to deracinate this creeper, so had to dig up the bed next to the wall and in places also had to lift paving blocks to get at the roots.

Now Nasturtiums have taken over where the creeper once was. If I'm ever in a fix for salad, I know where to go. The snails like it too, but Nasturtiums seem able to grow faster than snails can eat, so they're mostly whole.

Most wood doesn't do too well outdoors, and this arch is no exception. I'm guessing that it was untreated pine, simply painted. It has now rotted, and at some point the top of the arch broke, only to be held up by the then still present creeper stems. Now I counter the tension from the regular-looking washing line that hangs between the arch and the added-on bathroom, with a rope that doubles as replacement washing line. One of the formal lines, of course, broke, having been weakened by years of UV.

My advice? Live in an apartment if you don't crave a garden. It should be a craving, not just a vague desire for a manicured lawn and a few potted plants. Alternately, you could pave your garden, if that's your aesthetic. Or be wealthy, and hire gardeners.