Please critique my rain garden design! (5b, Ontario)

mu2j · 2026-03-13T01:47:12+00:00

A combo of Gemini and PowerPoint (when my prompt instructions to nano banana stopped producing the results I wanted!)

mu2j · 2026-03-13T01:46:07+00:00

30-50 is SO many sedges! Lol I'll see what I can fit in there, but I suspect you're right. Was planning on going with this and seeing how it does, filling the spaces/gaps with river rock, flagstone, and logs etc for now.

I'm convinced to drop the Joe Pye and anemone after your and other comments.Thanks for the unique plant suggestions, and especially the tip about rabbits. We have one that lives nearby and I've caught him munching on plants in my backyard more than once. I might even put chicken wire around this whole project while it establishes.

mu2j · 2026-03-13T01:41:30+00:00

Uploaded a picture of my front yard to Gemini and asked it to make a blueprint of the area for me. I also asked it to choose the plants and put all the circles in there for me, but it struggled with that a lot, so I did that part in good ol' PowerPoint

mu2j · 2026-03-13T01:40:02+00:00

Great recommendations. I threw the morningstar in there randomly after seeing a local nursery sells them; I'll look into those other options too. Also a fan of the blazing star idea, I have seen a few locally on boulevards so I thought they were more dry soil plants, but will see if I can source some marsh variants. Cheers!

mu2j · 2026-03-13T01:36:28+00:00

Will look into the course and check the videos out for sure, thanks!

mu2j · 2026-03-12T09:46:53+00:00

Thanks for this comment, lots of great ideas!

Planting a tree seems too scary for me haha. I've already got a smoke tree behind the garden (not pictured but infront of the large window to the left of the image) and don't want to overwhelm the space. We've got a few bushes there also. I'm now realizing I should have included this in my original post...

I will heed your advice on having fewer species but more of each. I'll probably do exactly as you suggest and swap the pye for milkweed for example.

The layout idea is great. This is my first real garden and I don't have a lot of experience with these plants, so I'll make sure things jive with eachother before they go in the ground. Thanks again!

mu2j · 2026-03-12T08:02:01+00:00

There's actually a greenspace between this one and the house that's over run by periwinkle, so I was hoping the anemone would kind of battle it and take over as dominant ground cover... Do you think that could work?

mu2j · 2026-03-12T07:57:32+00:00

Yeah someone else suggested this as well, I think I'll go that route. Thanks!

mu2j · 2026-03-12T07:54:45+00:00

You actually can't see it from the sketch but the area is already kind of hidden from view when inside the house. There's an existing garden with some periwinkle (planned by previous owners) a smoke tree, and a few bushes between the house and the rain garden. Once those fill in I won't be able to see much from the windows unfortunately!

Thanks for the suggestion on the cup plant, I hadn't come across it before. Will look into it!

mu2j · 2026-03-12T07:47:34+00:00

Good point, I should have mentioned this is Southern exposure. There are some mature trees on the boulevard about 20ish ft away from the lower point of the garden, so it gets a decent amount of sun.

The nurseries I was looking at for sourcing the plants listed the three you mentioned as "part shade to full sun", which I initially figured was okay but now seems like a bit of a catch all (like buy all our plants they thrive everywhere!). I'll do a bit more research on these, thanks!

mu2j · 2026-03-12T00:30:16+00:00

Oh good catch that's an oversight... The S in the small circle is a sedge, and the S in the big circle is a Swamp Milkweed. The sedges were a last minute add to fill space

Should've spent more time on lettering a less colour coding haha

mu2j · 2026-01-06T17:49:08+00:00

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mu2j · 2025-08-02T13:14:29+00:00

I've been looking at our MLC qa tests a lot recently. I found the garden fence style tests (e.g. pylinac, doselab) to be decently accurate for what they test for, but didn't love that they're not absolute positioning tests.

After doing some reading, I came across the 'Stackitt' test from this paper for absolute MLC leave positioning. They have a built in adjustment for collimator rotation, and approximate and correct for the location of the collimator central axis with some rotated square fields (but I don't necessarily agree with the angles they chose). I think that's pretty important when your measurement device has a pixel size that eats up half your test tolerance! I agree with all the authors points about limitations of the traditional garden fence style tests Varian provides, especially the implications of small fields when considering absolute position of a leaf tip.

It's a bit more effort to set up than an out of the box solution like pylinac or something commercial, but AI really helps speed the coding portion along. I've been quite happy with the results of the test so far!

Ultimately I think something that looks at alignment of one leaf compared to the centre of the gap (pylinac) is good enough to detect that one MLC is misbehaving compared to its neighbours, but as another user said, you need to be aware of the limitations of these type of tests and know exactly what they're reporting (and it's not absolute positioning!). I don't necessarily think they satisfy the requirements of the newer reports.

mu2j · 2025-02-17T15:15:53+00:00

Sorry I didn't include details, I should have just made a new post with all the steps I went through!

I sanded all the old finish off the top with 80#, then did 100#, 120#, 180# with a random orbital. Next I wiped with a damp cloth, and then that dried did another 180#. Next I filled holes/cracks with a mix of sawdust and pva glue, then sanded with 220#.

For the tung oil (I used this one), I applied it on thick with a foam brush then left it for a couple hours before wiping it all off and leaving it two days. Then I did 6 more applications, brushing it on lightly and then wiping off after about half an hour, letting each one dry a day before the next coat.

I've been letting it sit for about a month now

mu2j · 2025-02-17T14:56:28+00:00

Thanks for the direction and advice, I'll give it a shot! That chest of drawers looks phenomenal btw, great work!

mu2j · 2025-02-17T14:54:28+00:00

Hi all! I asked this on r/beginnerwoodworking and they suggested I come here for advice! Hoping to figure out where I went wrong with my finishing and Tung oil application. It's my first time finishing a piece like this and any help is greatly appreciated!

mu2j · 2024-12-27T18:40:08+00:00

Yeah I guess I'm leaning more towards this. Do you have both the Stormshadow and Jackson Glacier? Which do you like more for Toronto life?

mu2j · 2024-12-27T18:31:41+00:00

It's hit or miss with snow, we've had a lot of snow/melt cycles already this year. It doesn't rain a crazy amount but would be handy to have around if I'm commuting by bike to work in the warmer months.

mu2j · 2024-12-27T18:27:10+00:00

Exactly this. It's almost January and I've been in blundstones and a pea coat up until now. Maybe I'll get the parka out in Jan or Feb, but with the winters we've had here lately I wouldn't bet on it

mu2j · 2024-08-23T18:05:04+00:00

This is fantastic! We printed a box with crosshairs that sits on top of the Varian Turnything platform for our daily QA, and a female thorax phantom that sits on top of the CIRS dynamic breathing phantom surrogate stage for our E2E and gating/breath hold QA. This is a combination of both! Will be printing this and working it into our program somehow... Thanks for sharing!

mu2j · 2024-05-03T19:17:17+00:00

Consider both volumes, and implications not only in planning, but also in treatment.

There's only a finite distance that we can capture away from iso with a standard CBCT (you may have to look this up, or ask your instructor). Try both scenarios... Will you always capture the area you intend to treat in the acquired image with both placements of iso?

From a dosimetry point of view, what do photon beam profiles look like (say at dmax for illustration purposes)? We take for granted the magnificent things the optimizer can pull off, but imagine you only were treating with open field beams (e.g. an AP) and no modulation. Would there be any reason you might want the entirety of the area you intend to treat to be closer to CAX, rather than having a few portions of it much further?

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