Those of you who are long-time connoisseurs of garden blogs will be glad to know that Notes from Zone 4 is back where you can find it again. For those of you a bit newer to the garden blog scene, let me just say that the writers of this blog, Lisa and Frank Richards, win the “Guaranteed-to-make-your-jaw-drop” Blog Award hands down. As I mentioned before, they are very ambitious in all their projects, which have now gone beyond growing plants to raising sheep as well.
The project of theirs I’d most like to duplicate is their weather station set-up. Lisa first mentions it in her 5/10/2003 entry, and again in her 6/4/2003 entry. (They don’t have archive links set up for individual days, only for the year. You’d be better off searching on “weather station” with the search function.) Frank’s side of the story is here (scroll down to the 6/6 post). To see the results, go here, and then click on the About This Page link to see where they got their equipment.
Drool, slobber. My little weather station is acting up. It just doesn’t show the outdoor temperature very often anymore. Occasionally it will surprise us with a reading, but very sporadically, and no rhyme or reason to it. The remote sensor works just fine when I bring it in the house. Tried changing the batteries with no discernible difference. I am perplexed. The best wireless outdoor temperature recorder that I could find was Koch. Pricey, too, of course. And they don’t seem to put out a full fledged weather station that will talk to your computer and post to your website.
Two caveats about Notes from Zone 4: Their navigational links are acting funny. Once you start digging in the archives you will often have two or three links to “Home” at the top of the entry. The other warning is that they have tons of images on every page, and even with a cable connection it takes a very long time for it to all load. If you have a dial-up connection, I strongly suggest you turn images off in your browser before visiting this site, otherwise you might never get to see the first page load. And that would be a shame. Of course, since they take good pictures, turning off images is a shame, too, but we can’t always have our cake and eat it, too.
Yes, Julie, I finally figured that out. It is a pain in the butt because then I have to take the batteries out of the outdoor transmitter as well. Then new batteries in the receiver first, then back in the transmitter. Then leave them alone together inside so they can synchronize. Finally I can put the transmitter back outside.
I hear your weather station is acting funny. I may have a solution. Change the batteries on the station INSIDE. They need to be changed frequently. When done, push the reset button. You may still have times when it doesn’t read, but its less often.
I’m a zone 7 gardener who may move to a zone 3/4 garden area soon. What, am I crazy? I can grow almost ANYTHING in zone 7!
Julie Olson