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hoping the 41 year old version will attempt
Saturday, February 21 2009
David brought Penny over this morning to drop her off so she and Gretchen could go to the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary and play with piglets, and while they were here I took them on a tour of the greenhouse, the first such tour they'd been on since I closed it in back in December. it was a beautiful sunny day, so it was a great situation to show off its microclimate at its most pleasant. It was actually a little hot in there.
Penny seemed delighted with the structure. She's a stickler for æsthetics, and none of my æsthetic choices with the greenhouse seemed to upset her (and I could tell she'd been fearing the worst). She really liked the Portland-cement-covered walls and the bare slate bedrock floor, saying the space was too nice to be used as a greenhouse and that I should bring in couches and make it into a hangout spot. Penny had thought my intention was to cover the floor with dirt as part of making it a greenhouse, but I assured her any dirt would be in pots, that I had expended too much effort getting rid of dirt to start shoveling it in willy-nilly.
Now that I know what the drainage issues in the greenhouse are like, I've decided that there is much to be gained by beginning the digging of a hole in the floor's lowest spot. I could dig a hole of indeterminate depth through the soft layers of shale, and I could use it as a basin from which to bail water whenever the greenhouse floods. Of course, if the hole was deep enough, it might be an effective drywell to keep the greenhouse from flooding in all but the worst situations. Or perhaps I could dig down to a certain depth and then start tunneling sideways, perhaps to daylight, and never experience a flood ever again! Shale is such an easy rock to bore through that it seemed my greenhouse could eventually become the entrance for an elaborate series of hand-dug catacombs. That's the sort of thing the eight year old version of myself is desperately hoping the 41 year old version of myself will attempt.
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