"Most English-speaking people...will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if dissociated from its sense (and from its spelling). More beautiful than, say, sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful. Well then, in Welsh for me cellar doors are extraordinarily frequent, and moving to the higher dimension, the words in which there is pleasure in the contemplation of the association of form and sense are abundant."
-- J.R.R Tolkien via wikipedia
Today we did not make a cellar door but we did make something nearly as beautiful in essence. We finished off the end of the greenhouse, and built and hung two eight foot doors. Quite grand an achievement. It consumed about 40 person hours of work (at most), and plenty of lumber. But the result is that the second half of the greenhouse can be used now to grow tomatoes.
Again, I iterate that it is immensely satisfying to pretend to be a carpenter. The aesthetics of working with wood, saws, pencils, and screws is enormous. Especially when it gets to be around four in the afternoon and the day is cooling off slightly, and the earth and wood and trees are lit up with the slanting golden light. It's pretty easy to feel like a king, I say.
Then there's the fact of actually constructing something physical. It's a bit of the same enjoyment I get from writing computer programs, only there's a different flavour with this. Maybe partly because it's a fairly new experience for me... it's like programming with a new language, or maybe like working with databases or threads for the first time. I'm exploring an new terrain and that's inherently exciting. Construction is also incredibly fun because I'm reasonable good at it -- working the numbers, and the designs come naturally enough -- so I'm able to move at a decent pace. And that keeps me entertained.
There wasn't much work in the greenhouse today. Ali and Leslie trimmed the onions because they were getting a bit long and floppy. Trimming them (about three centimetres, or until they stand about ten centimetres) is supposed to cause the seedling to put more energy into root and stem growth rather than continuing to grow upwards. The result is a heartier seedling that is more prepared for transplanting and the outdoors.
We also did a second spraying of the horsetail mixture I mentioned before. Leslie noticed some "dampening off" on some of the broccoli and other brassica family members. Dampening off is a condition where the young seedlings just flop over and die. It's often due to a fungus that grows on the soil because it is too moist. It's part of the reason we installed the fan -- greater air movement means less chance of parts of the greenhouse becoming damp -- and also why we first sprayed the horsetail mixture.
