The stuff, it (still) owns you

[rebeccmeister]

I had ambitions for the weekend. Not all of them were realized. One was this: I have a one of those two-burner Coleman Duel Fuel stoves, but it has had unidentifiable issues the last two times I've gone to use it. So I did what one does and poked around online to look for instructions on how to take one apart and clean it.

On Saturday, I cleaned out the generator, and it seemed like the pump assembly is doing just fine with respect to generating and maintaining pressure. After all that failed to resolve the problem, on Sunday I also pulled off the manifold, soaked it in soapy water for a while, rinsed, and then left it out to dry.

I hope it works when I get to test it again this evening.

Also, a question: I got a pair of 10-foot wooden stakes, which I want to use as tomato supports. Then I learned that the soil into which I want to drive the stakes is very hard and rocky. Do any of you know much about techniques for sinking large wooden stakes into that kind of soil?

Comments

[bluepapercup]

I drive six-foot stakes at work all the time and usually use a pick or my rock hammer to make a starter hole as deep as possible and then drive the stake in with a small sledge after. How much of the stake do you need into the ground? two feet? three feet? At a certain point it may be worth excavating a hole and planting the stake as deep as you want it and then filling the hole back in.

[rebeccmeister]

For these stakes, I think I'll need to put ~2 feet in the ground. Unfortunately, I want to put them in spots where it would be really hard to excavate a hole - but I think randomdreams is onto something with his stake driver...and I think I'll try to come up with something comparable.

[randomdreams]

I gave up on wooden stakes after splintering too many. Now I use metal broom handles, electrical conduit, rebar, or whatever else metal I find lying on the side of the road.
Perhaps predictably, I made a stake driver. It's a piece of extremely thick wall tubing, maybe 8mm thick, with the inner diameter of the tubing maybe 40mm, and I welded a big chunk of round steel on the end. It does a great job.

[rebeccmeister]

Yeah, after posting this and mulling things over a bit more, I remembered that my dad had this huge, long, steel wrecking bar, and it seems like a fantastic thing for driving a hole.

I'll have to take a picture of these things. I might accidentally destroy them, but I suspect they'll be okay.

[randomdreams]

This is pretty much useless advice, I know, but I've done a lot of hole drilling using old ship augers. They're useless here, and if they're too worn to be resharpened, using them to punch holes in dirt isn't really a waste. I have one that's a meter long, and boy does it do a great job of putting a nice 22mm hole down through the ground. It wouldn't handle a football-sized rock, but it'll push aside fist-sized rocks on its way down. I've seen some others at a local scrapyard that must be two meters long. No idea how I'd drive them, but http://www.irwin.com/tools/drill-bits/ship-auger-bits. (Mine have a tapered square shank for use with wood braces, rather than these intended for power drills, because mine are probably 120 years old.)

[scrottie]

http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/56400/56497/56497_auger_lg.gif

[rebeccmeister]

I had that thought, too, but those look expensive and hard-to-find. Bring me one from the Midwest?

[randomdreams]

If you want a two meter long one for about $5, I know where to get one. Or fifteen.
well hey look I even took a picture.

[rebeccmeister]

So I discovered that the Amazonia sells digging rods. Although I'm tremendously curious to know how such items would be packaged and shipped, I wound up forgoing that in favor of supporting the local hardware store. :^)

[randomdreams]

I will say, having tried both, that a post driver is easier for me than a digging rod for putting in supports for tomatoes and such. Some of my supports are aluminum extrusion from a disassembled shower door and steel tubing from broom handles after the broom itself failed.

[rebeccmeister]

I could understand the post driver being easier, although I don't think it would have worked with the posts I had already purchased (see photos in my subsequent post.

This particular set of tomato plants is going to try and be about 8 feet tall, I reckon, so I wanted to REALLY get vertical with 'em.

I'm glad I only tried to dig 2 holes with the digging rod, for now. :^)

[randomdreams]

My ex-coworker built massive, massive piles of tomatoes. He ended up making his own cages with fencing material: welded wire rectangles just large enough to fit your hand through the holes. He'd make a somewhat over a meter in diameter round thing and stake that to the ground, and once the tomato had grown up to about a meter high, the height of that fence section, he'd stack another on top. I think he ended up pollarding them at a bit over 2 meters because he physically couldn't safely get to tomatoes growing higher than that. Thankfully mine haven't ever grown that tall.

[rebeccmeister]

Hmm, that does sound like a nice long-term tomato management strategy. I've seen similar things. It sort of boggles the mind that there aren't more readymade commercial designs for us folks who have crazy big tomato plants.

[randomdreams]

The coolest setup I saw was in a greenhouse in Montana, where they had strings running from the ground up to the apex, that they trained the tomatoes up, and ladders on rollers so they could reach the whole 3 meter height.

[randomdreams]

Oh hey similar thoughts.