Well, we had a small disaster at The Havens yesterday.
We store the cold frames and their glass lids on the back wall of the vegetable garden fence. This is a very convenient place for them; it eliminates the necessity of hauling them into the barn and then tripping over them there all summer. For several years they have spent their summers stored on the fence with no ill effects. You can see them in their place in the following photograph.
Our bow to safety was to use tempered glass for the glazing. We acquired a whole pile of around 30 pieces of tempered glass patio door blanks that were rejects at the factory because they were uneven in thickness or some such thing. They were exactly right for the cold frames, and we have planned to build a greenhouse using them, someday.
Even tempered glass will break. Sometime in the past week or so a rock came in contact with the glass at a high enough rate of speed that it shattered the whole pane. It is unclear whether this was an artifact of the weed eating process, or that I managed to throw a perfect strike with a small rock that I found in the pond during the pond cleaning operations, or a malicious rabbit or squirrel’s vandalism. Whatever the source or cause, Jim noticed the fact that the pane was broken during his weed eating chores yesterday. Focused completely on the task at hand and the area right under the head of the tool, he immediately noticed the pile of broken glass pieces that had fallen out of the pane of glass.
Most of the pane had remained in the frame, and so he stopped what he was doing and began to clean up the glass that was on the ground. I noticed that the weed eater had ceased running, and curious to know why he was kneeling in apparent worship at the back fence of the vegetable garden, approached the scene. I watched the process of painstaking removal of glass for a moment, and then commented, “I don’t know, but if I had to do that job I might try using the shop vac.”
Well, there wasn’t that much glass left to pick up, so he demurred from breaking out the heavy sucking equipment, and persisted until all the little bits of glass had been cleaned up.
Then we tried to move the frame to a place where we could remove the rest of the glass and clean up afterwards rather more easily. We chose the car port for this activity. A tarp was deployed beneath the broken pane, and we gingerly lowered the whole mess to the tarp. So far, so good; the glass remained within the frame. We thought we were home free until we started to gather up the tarp to contain the whole mess during removal. Alas, the tarp was not quite wide enough to completely surround the frame, but we thought that it went up far enough that if the glass gave way it would all fall down into the tarp.
Ha ha! We thought wrong. As soon as we began to lift the frame, the gentle twisting of the operation caused the entire pane of glass to fall into all its thousands of little component bits. While, indeed, the vast majority of them did land in the tarp, there was quite a lot distributed over the ground and in the grass where the disintegration occurred, because they did not choose to fall straight down, but kind of exploded out in all directions at once. What a mess.
And so, we did indeed break out the shop vacuum. If anyone had happened by they would have been quite amused and possibly confuzzled by the picture we made, carefully and systematically vacuuming the dirt under the fence and the lawn just south of it.
It puts a whole new complexion on the idea of de-thatching the lawn.
No video?
Afraid not. “Video at 11” just rolls off the tongue, though, doesn’t it? Aside from the fact that I didn’t think of documenting this event at the time, I have no clue as to how one edits and posts video. I tried editing a video I took and got nowhere, decided that perhaps it was a bit more than this luddite could handle.
I think you have to pay extra for upload privileges for your own video. Like extra beans and onions at the chili place.
You do everything on such a huge scale.
Look at that battery of coldframes.
I have one.
You go me worried now: I use a catapult with gay abandon. Let me rephrase that: cheerful abandon.
Actually, I use defunct double glazing, and there is no way we manage to break the glass, not even with a hammer. Still, substances behave differently under different circumstances.
You needed time in the swing after all that.
There are really only two coldframes up there although we do have a third one that we no longer use and it resides in the barn. We take the lids off and store them separately so it looks like a lot more.
You have a catapult? What do you use it for, just for fun? Sounds like something my husband would love.
Lol and Oopsie too. The most important things is that nobody got hurt by flying/exploding glass. And hey, any excuse will do to get the shop vac out, right? Running and ducking!
The shop vac is a wonderful thing. No need to run and duck! It is the ONLY thing that cleans the needles up from the Yule tree; they give my regular vacuum nearly fatal indigestion.
I would have paid good money to see you and Jim vacuuming the lawn. It’s good to keep the neighbors confuzzled. That way they won’t borrow you tools because they think you’re crazy.
We loan our tools to our neighbor across the street on a regular basis. Always get them back too. I don’t think he cares that we are crazy. The other neighbor across the street is our tenant and we are actually great friends with them and have gone “shares” in a rototiller with them. The small town Midwest is a different place to live. We haven’t forgotten how to be a neighborhood the way the big city has. When we lived in San Francisco, we were considered very odd because we actually tried (and succeeded) to get to know our neighbors.
are you sure you were not skipping rocks on the pond again????? HA HA LOL
Ha ha ha. My pond isn’t big enough to skip rocks. What I did was fling one out of the pond area and I suspect that is the culprit in the deed. But Jim very kindly is not willing to assign any fault. It happened. Big deal. We have more glass.
oh that must have looked so funny. I wonder if someone who blogged saw it? Can you imagine them racing home to blog about it?
God I hope so! Then there would be two posts about it!