What to do when - Jan-April in Willamette Valley

Often we look to our unwritten, unspoken schedule of "what to do when" to decide what can done outside.  Sometimes in the winter, I think we should prune the grapes, but that should be done the first two weeks of February.  We could cut some black locust for fence posts next fall but we don't have the trees marked yet.  We could plant some lettuce for early crop but it is still too cold without a cold frame.   Wait a minute, maybe I should write these 'lists' down and see if they make sense to anyone else.

So here are the first four  months and what work makes sense to us.

January - 

• Prune shrubs and pile prunings for burning in April
• Order native plants from County for February pickup
• Plant year old grapes that were started last February
  
• Renew any grape arbor stakes, wires, posts, hardware that need work
• Discourage any gopher activity with propane.  They have mated and are staying underground to raise their young
• Plan, plan, plan -  by drawing pictures, talking about ideas and most of all, walking the ground to see how everything did last growing season.  Made something easier to take care of for this coming growing season.  Look and think beyond the current landscape and plantings and buildings into the future for 5, 10, 20 and 50 years if not more.  Make big and little plans, short range and long range plans and keep notes of the good ideas

February - 

• Prune grapes and put grape cuttings into pots for next year's planting
• Finish pruning all fruit and nut trees and pile brush for burning after it dries out
• Plant perennials and trees
• Plant native plants in fencerows and on property 
• Plant first lettuce towards end of month
• Mow at least once if dry enough
• Use sulphur and propane on any gopher activity.  Better to do it now before the March gopher babies are born.  Watch for the deep soil "chimneys" that come up above their larders.

March - 

• Finish planting all trees - next month is too late.  
• Plant perennials and shrubs; water in the plants
• Weed like crazy and mulch beds right behind, prior to April flush of new growth
  
• Mow grass, taking off no more than an inch per mowing if possible
• Plant 2nd lettuce and begin planting other cool weather greens

April  -  

• Weed more to try to get ahead of the May rush of growth
• Burn fall and winter prunings under blue skies with white clouds going over - do not let pile sit over summer if possible
  
• Finish all perennial plantings and water in each plant as it is planted
• Plant more greens - lettuce goes into the ground every four weeks minimum through till October
• Mow grass during any dry spell as it will easily get tall now
• Test drip irrigation in the grapes and test sprinkler system.  Irrigation begins in May.

Next four months coming soon

Kind of hot for Willamette Valley

Top numbers are outside temp, then inside temp, then Time. Broke 100
today and tomorrow and the house just gets warmer every day. Cats have
turned to silly putty and everything is warm. Relief on Sunday.

Dripping the young table grapes in Rickreall

Now we are dripping 4 gals per week per plant as we go through the normal late summer drought and the table grape plants want to quit growing. In June and July we were happy with two gallons per plant per week. Some of the plants are over 7 feet tall while others struggle to stay alive at 8".

10 things I want on my iphone & a few I don't care about

After living for over a year with my first cell phone/pda/mobileWeb/portableGamingDevice/ipod/toy, there are STILL a few things I would like to have changed. Even with all the things this small device can do, I still find time to write about the things it Can't do.
So here goes.

1. Cut/Copy/Paste - Since there is so many different applications on my phone, a lot of time I want take some info from one thing and put it in another. Like copy a piece of text from a web page and place it in an email or copy something from an email and put it in some notes.
2. Voice command dialing - This really should be #1 on my list, cause of safety and all. Just say "Iphone Call Karen" and have it respond, even if I have to wake it up first or press a button twice. Even with a microphone, an customizable address book, a fast processor and 1000 apps available for downloading already, no one ..yet.. has a good working voice dialing program. I'm sure it's coming.
3. Custom icons and Themes - You can get hundreds of themes if you jailbreak your phone and having done that, I miss them in Apple's 2.01 version. Themes is about the only reason I would jailbreak my phone now that the AppStore is available. This feature probably has to come from Apple and I sure hope it comes soon. I miss being able to have different pictures on the icons and different (sometimes WAY different) backgrounds. This stuff is the fun stuff!
   
4. Sending appointments between phones - Karen and I both have iphones but for the life of me, we cannot get a reliable way to send the other an appointment. If we bought MobileMe and it worked, then we could (I think). We can't even sync our calendars on our Macs using iCal yet, for some reason, and don't get me started on google calendars or yahoo calendars. The last tools I used to sync them moved everyone's birthday back a day and reproduced appointments up to five times on the wrong day. Sigh.
5. Searching and/or Syncing notes - I bet someone, somewhere, is probably getting an application ready now to sell in the app store for doing this and I will be glad to buy it. Right now I email my notes to myself to keep them on my computer but there is no way to re-edit them or re-arrange the content for clarity.
6. Filming Videos - I know software is coming and none too soon. Even with the 2 megapixel lens, we were able to get good videos out of some jailbroken software. Wouldn't it be fun to be able to capture videos and save them/send them ?
   
7. View contacts as database - I have entered notes about most of my contacts; things I want to remember about individuals, companies, new friends, sites, forums, etc. Wouldn't it be great to be able to mine that information or at least re-order it. How about an application that at least displays that information on a 'sheet'? Better yet, one that allows me to edit the contact info and re-sync it to the phone.
8. Camera interface - pressing that tiny little icon to take a picture has caused me lots of heartaches. I love the fact that I have a camera on me all the time and have captured hundreds of shots that would have faded away but that tiny little button has got to be replaced. There is a jailbreak app that used the whole screen as a button and allowed tagging of photos. Now that would be appreciated.
   
9. Printing - OK, so it is a phone but with so much content and so much input, is it too much to ask it to send a wifi signal to my printer and put it on paper once in a while?
   
10. Info on unlock screen: A jailbreak application showed SMS, emails, RSS feeds, recent calls, etc on the unlock screen. This was awesome and allowed a one-click access to the most dynamic information on the device and I could customize it to what I wanted. It was a little buggy at times but really helped me use the phone.
    

There are so many truly fine things about my iphone, that I can't begin to list them. Among my favorites are the way the following things work on the phone: maps, texting, music, itunes, app store, photos, podcasts, videos, youtube, web pages as icons, sending calls to vmail, photos for contacts, games, drawing, SHAZAM!, twitter, wifi access, free custom ringtones with GarageBand and using the cell signal to get web content.

Some things I don't care about:

1. MMS - Never had it, never missed it. If I want to send someone an image or video, I use email. Heck, I can even email to their MMS account if they have one and can afford the message.
2. Non-removable battery - someday I might care but there will probably be a new 3g in my hands before this battery gives out and needs replacement.
3. Keyboard -I do fine with the touch keyboard and appreciate the ability to change the keyboard based on the application. If I have a lot of typing to do, I use my computer as it has a nice keyboard.
4. VOIP client - what the hay? I have spare minutes with all the calling I do, who needs Voice over IP to manage and deal with.
5. Not be on AT&T - Well, where we live, AT&T is fine. In fact, it beat sprint and a few other providers on previous cell phones. 3g is due here this summer so we might get even faster.
6. Stereo bluetooth - I haven't gone to bluetooth, much less heard stereo through it. No problem here with a few cables. In fact, I still think people look weird with those things in their ears, especially after decades of the Hearing Aid industry making their devices disappear.
7. Self facing camera - Huh? Most of the stuff I want pictures of, is in front of me, where I can see them. Why take a picture of behind me? Oh, you mean I want to send a photo of me... don't think so...

That should do it for now.

My Saturday work

More wood, more work for someone. In this case, I spent a couple hours
cutting 18" oak rounds for a family at work that wanted to buy some
firewood. This is such fine oak firewood - dry, straight, uniform,
cracked, and just right for stoves.