The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Gardening

Growing and sometimes fixing

Vole Traps: Rebaited

Although the drilled sunflower seeds worked reasonably well, various critters gnawed through the threads and escaped unharmed with the seeds. We tried gluing seeds to the trigger with good old Elmer’s Non-Toxic School Glue, only to find garden ants absolutely love the stuff.

Well, if voles like seeds, they’ll surely like nuts:

Rat traps – walnut halves

Those are rat traps (much bigger than mouse traps) with walnut halves secured to the top and bottom of the trigger with hot melt glue.

Yes, the plywood plates under the traps hold them together. There’s no reason to put fancy new traps outdoors where they succumb to weather in short order; these are veterans from previous episodes.

Having taken out two voles with sunflower seeds over the course of a week, the walnuts accounted for two more voles in three days. Mary thinks a neighbor vole needs a day to notice its buddy has gone missing, so the average pace may be a vole every other day.

Bonus: Gnawing on the nuts or trying to pull them away triggers the trap, so those walnuts are still out there.

The community gardens have enough voles to attract Red Tailed Hawks, which have started perching on fence posts and stooping on voles foolish enough to run along the paths or into grassy areas. Some gardeners seem disconcerted by the presence of such large birds in close proximity, but Mary assures them they’re helpers.

2024-08-30
Please Close The Gate Signs: One Year

They still look pretty good after a year:

Please Close The Gate – weathered acrylic – 2024-07-20

Which is to say: the orange acrylic hasn’t faded, the black paint’s still in place, and the gates seem to stay closed.

One might quibble about the missing wire snippet on the lower left corner, but on the whole it doesn’t get much better than that …

2024-08-02
Laser Test Paper: Plant Label Testing

After a month outdoors, the (failed) flexible strip labels show signs of wear:

Laser test paper – 1 month weathering

The upper one has a coating of clear rattlecan paint and looks much the better for it. The lower one is bare, but also suffered greatly from being folded and tucked through itself, so it started in worse condition.

Perhaps the paper will work better when stuck to metal plant label stakes, although I suspect the adhesive sheet will fail first:

Laser test paper – small plant labels

Those are random names; Mary tells me the proper label format has the Latin nomenclature on the first line.

They’re now out on the patio for observation.

For whatever it’s worth, my fascination with this paper boils down to “it’s cheaper than Trolase” for applications not requiring archival quality and duration. If it lasts Long Enough, that’ll be Good Enough.

2024-07-26
Drilled Sunflower Seeds

It seems the best bait for voles is to tie sunflower seeds to the trap trigger, but poking a needle through the seeds tends to split them.

Well, I can fix that:

Sunflower seeds – drilled

This is “shell drilling” of a kind I had not previously encountered:

Sunflower seeds in shell – drilled

Those are #52 drill holes, 63-ish mils in diameter, and pass a standard sewing needle with ease.

The traps have been baited and deployed amid a plague of voles and I await customer feedback …

2024-07-01
Laser Test Paper: Outdoor Testing

“Laser test paper” is, of course, intended for testing lasers, but I thought it might make a outdoor plant tag. A while ago I tried some Trolase Thins acrylic for that job:

Plant tags – Trolase Thin – prototypes

Which turned out to be entirely too stiff, which wasn’t surprising given that Trolase Thin is intended for signage stuck on flat or slightly curved surfaces.

Despite being “paper”, laser testing paper is also too stiff:

Laser test paper – outdoor labels – 2024-06-22

The wrinkles and cracks on the left end of the tags shows the plastic coating makes it basically impossible to shape / bend the paper enough to wrap around a plant stem, then push it through the hole (offscreen to the left). I was not surprised too much by this discovery.

Those two strips now hang outside the kitchen window (left end upward), where they’ll get enough sun and rain to keep a plant happy, and I’ll see how well the engraved / damaged plastic coating stands up to that sort of abuse.

For Science!

2024-06-26
The Tree Frog Insists

After deporting the same tree frog from her shoe five times over the course of a month, Mary finally admitted defeat:

Tree Frog in Shoe – The Frog Insists

We think this is the same frog who insisted on sunning itself on the railing back in June:

Tree frog – back on the railing

If that isn’t a smug smile, I don’t know what one might look like.

When she related this tale at a Master Gardener meeting, one of her cronies said a similar frog commandeered a shoe and refused all offers of a new home, so apparently tree frogs and shoes just go together.

Anybody that persistent deserves whatever it wants; Mary will get a new pair of shoes and keep them indoors.

2023-09-22
Onion Maggot Fly vs. Sticky Traps: Season 3 Finale
The six sticky traps guarding Mary’s onion beds in her Vassar Community Gardens plots collected this assortment of critter and mulch from mid-July through mid-August, when she harvested the last of the crop:
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap A
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap B
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap C
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap D
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap E
VCCG Onion Maggot Trap F
The labels do not match those on the first set through mid-July, because I don’t care quite enough to keep track of them.

The traps don’t collect many onion maggot flies, which suggests that a little control goes a long way. As far as she’s concerned, these traps work very well, because the crop has very little maggot damage.

Searching for onion sticky traps will produce the rest of the collection. Contact me for the full resolution images, should you need to ID all the critters.
2023-08-31