Happy Farming . com

I have previously written a good deal about raised beds made out of raw, untreated wooden planks. I don’t like the idea of building out of pressure-treated wood since I’m not sure if there are any chemicals or salts leaking into the soil. I’ve been using either spruce or pine, I’m not really sure, but I took a picture of the raw planks:

If you know what sort of wood it is, please let me know in the comments.

The raised beds have been outside in the garden for two years now and are beginning to show signs of decay. It’s not really that bad:

It looks like they could last many more years:

But then I took a look at the backside of one of the planks and found this:

It could be that the wood at this spot has been exposed to soil with higher moisture than elsewhere but then again the soil looks the same to me.

I have planned on building three more raised beds out of this type of wood, but now I think it would be better to find some rectangular concrete tiles and place them upright around the edge of the beds. This would be a little more work but the beds could last for centuries.
Now I just have to think of a new project for the planks I’ve already bought.

Here’s a bit more explanation on how to run the temperature logging system I described earlier.
The system automatically stores the value of its sensors every five minutes using the crontab function in Linux. crontab is a schedule of recurring things to be done in the form of commands to be run on the system. There’s different crontab’s for different users. In this particular NSLU2 system I’m running crontab commands as root user. As far as I remember it was necessary to do that to have sufficient rights on the system.
To see what is in your crontab at the moment, run this command:

crontab -l

where -l is for list only. Use -e for editing your crontab:

crontab -e

This will start a default editor, in my case ‘nano’, so that you can make changes to your list.

crontab -l on this system gives this output:

# m h  dom mon dow   command
*/5 * * * * /home/thomas/happyfarming/update_temp_2.sh &> /dev/null
*/5 * * * * /home/thomas/happyfarming/upload_temps.sh

m: Minute. “/5″ means every five minutes.
h: Hour
command: Command to be executed. I run the update_temp_2.sh script every five minutes. “&> /dev/null” takes the output from this command and discards it, so that I don’t get a mail every five minutes.
* means at every value, i.e. minute is 1 through 60 or hour is 1 through 24 etc.

The other command or script I run is upload_temps.sh. This will upload the graphs to this website, making them available in posts.

This is what my upload_temps.sh script looks like:

#!/bin/bash
sleep 30
lftp -u USER,PASSWORD SERVER <<EOF
cd /images/
lcd /home/thomas/happyfarming/
put log_h.png
put log_d.png
put log_w.png
put log_m.png
put log_y.png
quit 0
EOF

using FTP to upload the files.