Rain, ducks and data

 

The numbers show the May rainfall at various locations in mid-Michigan. The smile-face is my approximate location. The Evaporation-Potential at those locations varied between 3.9" and 4.3" for the month of May.

Fortunately, we went into May with the soil almost saturated with water. 

Alas, that water is now depleted and I am back to lugging water for the newly planted trees in the various orchards I am caring for.

Unexpected

The adult Khaki Campbell went broody and is sitting on her eggs. She is totally dedicated, but she is giving it the old college try.

I don't know what pushed-her-button but I expect it was the chirping of the new ducklings.

Khaki Campbell ducks are generally "not-broody" by nature.

Expected

The male Rouen duck became increasingly aggressive toward the four ducklings. He was keeping them away from the food and chasing them out of the enclosure. The ducklings would squeeze out between the door and the fence when the Rouen was chasing them.

I culled him with a pellet to the head. 

Random thought

Many modern vehicles have a thermometer a short distance in front of the radiator that measures the temperature of the ambient air. They also have GPS.

Companies sell "data". It is revenue that they can harvest with very little incremental cost.

It would be interesting to collect strings of GPS data and the time and temperature associated with that data. A fellow could remove everything except the hour around sunrise and an hour in late afternoon and get an exceptionally high resolution picture of the actual temperatures. Perhaps even high enough resolution to map micro-climates.

Obviously, the data analyst would NOT consider data when the vehicle was stationary because the temperature would be polluted with recirculated air or it might be sitting in a garage.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

John James Audubon aka Jean-Jacques Rabin was born in 1785 in what is now Haiti. Due to racial tensions, his father evacuated him to France in 1788 (thus avoiding the Haitian 1791 genocide of white people).

"Audubon grew up to be a handsome and gregarious man. He played flute and violin, and learned to ride, fence, and dance^*" facts which will doubtlessly delight some of my readers.

In 1803 Audubon immigrated to the United States to simultaneously avoid the draft (Napoleon's wars) and to manage his father's properties near Philadelphia. He did not speak English at the time.

"Audubon lived with the tenants in the two-story stone house, in an area that he considered a paradise. "Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment; cares I knew not, and cared naught about them."  Studying his surroundings, Audubon quickly learned the ornithologist's rule, which he wrote down as, "The nature of the place—whether high or low, moist or dry, whether sloping north or south, or bearing tall trees or low shrubs—generally gives hint as to its inhabitants." 

Life for Audubon was not all skittles and cream. After a trip, he returned home to find that rats had destroyed all 200+ of his paintings. Later, in 1819 he was thrown in jail for being in debt.

Even today Audubon is criticized for circumstances that he had no control over. For instance, his father had owned slaves.

Audubon died in 1851.

Audubon is sometimes criticized for his "stilted" or "artificial looking" poses. Bear in mind that there were no trail-cams to capture these birds in the wild. Audubon collected his models by shooting them (with primitive firearms) and guessing at how they stood.

Audubon was blessed to have been born with the skills he had and the time period when he came-of-age. Interest in the natural world and the scientific cataloguing of species was at a fever-pitch and Audubon had an enthusiastic market for his work.

A tip of the battered fedora to 10x25mm for suggesting this artist. He is giving Tireless a run for the money. 

*All material in quotation marks are from Wikipedia 

Spaniels

Spaniels are a class of dog that were initially developed in Spain (hence the "Spanish dogs" becoming "Spaniels") and later refined in England.

Spaniels were one of the first classes of dogs developed to complement the hunting of small game with rudimentary firearms. Given the limitations of the weapon, the hunter had to be close to the game before it flushed.

Spaniels are bonded to their human(s) by a very short distance. They have been selected over hundreds of generations to be happy when they are no farther away from their human than a scant 20-to-25 paces. Some call that "needy" or "clingy". While descriptive, those terms put a perjorative spin on the bond. In the beginning, the bond was functional and it only became pathological when puppy-mills churned out puppies.

Springerpoos and Cockapoos are on the list of dogs we will consider when the time comes. We are both in the last quarter of our lives. Chasing after a dog holds no joy or glory for us any more.

It would be delightful if we could take our dog out to the garden, tell him/her to sit in a shady corner while we pulled weeds and have them stay. Hunting-drive is nice but having a switch to turn it on-and-off is nicer. 

Springerpoos tend toward a little larger than our optimum size. A "Standard" SP is 30-to-60 pounds with the bitches being lighter than the males.

Cockapoos tend to be a little smaller than our optimum size. A "Standard" CP runs 25-to-35 pounds. The males tend to be larger and would be more likely to hit our 30lb-to-40lb sweet-spot.

A cladogram of some common dog breeds. The farther the breeds are apart the greater the potential hybrid advantage.

Red highlight are the common spaniels. The magenta highlight shows poodles. The aqua colored dot is for chihauhau (used in a lot of designer crosses) The tangerine colored dots are "Asian" dogs, also used in a lot of designer crosses.

One random fact is that different places took their local dogs and selected for specific purposes. For instance, many British Isle terriers which LOOK like German Schnauzers are in fact are very different genetically...while Boston Terriers were selected from Boxer-like dogs and so on. 

Brittany Spaniels are really not spaniels. They are pointing-dogs and don't have the same invisible leash holding them close to their humans. 

Both crosses will be magnets for burdock burs. 

Grafting notes, Fine Art, Pride Week and Peak-pollen

Grafting notes 

Two pecan seedlings near the road grafted to Kanza.

Five Black Walnut seedlings and one "Carpathian" Walnut were grafted to Howard Persian Walnut. "Howard" is a big stretch for our climate. There are growers in New York State who are growing seedlings of Howard crossed with an undocumented pollen parent and they are observing acceptable winter-hardiness.

Howard is a variety out of the University of California breeding program and is planted commercially. It has excellent nut quality, blight resistance, is late-leafing and shows lateral bud "fruiting".

It was not selected for cold-hardiness but sometimes you get more than you expect. 

The trees grafted to "Howard" are marked with blue surveyor's tape.

If anybody knows of a grafted tree of "Howard" planted near a tree of "Broadview", I am very interested in purchasing walnuts for seed nuts from either tree.

Las Vegas

I don't have to buy lottery tickets or travel to Las Vegas or load an app on my phone to get the thrill of beating the odds. I plant seeds and graft trees. 

Fine Art Tuesday, sort of

It started. Quicksilver's artwork is now being featured on our refrigerator door.

"My grandparents are SO OLD that they have paper with dinosaur tracks done its sides."

This gallery is titled "Spooky Monsters"

A large number of Quicksilver's subjects show unequal dilation of their pupils suggesting brain trauma. I suspect that I was one of her models.

Pride Month events

It has been very quiet out there. It has been nothing like the circus of the last 12 years where you couldn't turn around without tripping over an LGBT-ellomennopeepeedeeque flag. It had been as reliable as the rising sun, even "Christian" churches displayed infinitely more "rainbow" flags in June than the number of "crosses" they displayed during Holy Week.

I think that there are many corporations who were relieved to have a graceful way to stop pushing-the-rope. They were able to say "Trump made us do it" and abandon policies that (potentially) alienated 96% of their customer-base. That excuse freed those corporations and mom-and-pop shops to make adjustments based on what the majority of what the paying customers want.

Peak pollen = Low energy

Hugh Scott, an engineer I used to work with, once observed that the difference between people who changed the world for the better and the people who were forgotten is that the Mother Theresas and Thomas Edisons kept slogging. They got SOMETHING done every day even when they were running at 40%. The people who have been forgotten...they decided to tread-water on those days.

I consider anything I get done during peak-pollen to be a major win. Meds make me sleepy. Not taking meds makes me sleepy and I itch so I cannot sleep. Rain predicted for Saturday, so I hope to break out through the other side by then.

Presented without comment

 

Birds, beans, squash and marimbas

Gray Catbirds

We have a Gray Catbird building a nest near the garden. It is probably in the filbert hedge but it could be in the over-grown raspberry bushes.

Catbirds mimic other birds, are an even slate-gray except for a slightly darker region on the top of his/her head. Their tail is long for their body size and they often position it in jaunty, expressive angles...sort of like some people communicating with their eyebrows. They are a bit larger than a starling and their regular call sounds something like a cat. 

Snail vs Duck Damage 

These two bean plants were on the duck side of the fence.

I stretched a temporary fence to exclude the ducks from where Quicksilver and I had planted the pole beans. Due to the geometry of where there were already posts driven into the ground, four beans popped up outside of the enclosure. The ducks ignored them.

Leaves that have been attacked by snails (Gee, officer...it happened so fast...) have a luffa-sponge look. The slugs and snails eat the thin parts of the leaves but don't eat the veins.

I opened up the fence to let the ducks in to where the beans are planted.

Four young Khaki Campbell to the right of the post and two adult Rouen and one adult Khaki Campbell on the left.

They quickly investigated the area and were actively foraging while I took this picture.

 

Snails and slugs have distinct preferences for food. They prefer dandelions to grass, for instance. 

 

Squash and watermelons

Roughly 25' by 25'. 26 "hills" of C. maxima and 9 of watermelons

The squash seeds were saved from a squash that I purchased at the store. It was a Golden Hubbard or Red Kuri type squash.

Quicksilver music selection

Polish Nationwide Music Schools' Symphonic Orchestras Dance Macrabre by Saint Saens. 

Selected because she can watch young ladies playing music.. Also selected because it has marimbas, one of the musical instruments commonly used in Central American music.

Red, clay soils

Note: This essay is what I think I know about growing plants in the south. Hopefully, Lucky will chime in and correct my errors.

Early studies of nutrient cycling in moist tropical forests describes productive forests rich in nutrients in which the rates of primary production (photosynthesis) and amounts of nutrients cycled clearly exceeded those in temperate zone forests. Reviews of global-scale patterns in biomass, production and nutrients cycling reported these results as representative of tropical forests.

At the same time, tropical forest soils were described as acide, infertile clay that hardens irreversibly to “laterite” when cleared or to bleached, quartz sands low in mineral nutrients. This apparent paradox was crystalized by Whittaker in the statement “The tropical rain forest thus has a relatively rich nutrient economy perched on a nutrient-poor substrate.” P.M. Vitousek and R.L. Sanford, 1986

The forest floor in the tropics teem with termites, ants, terrestrial crabs, centipedes, snails, slugs and similar scavengers. A piece of snake feces falling from the canopy and hitting the ground is cleaned up within minutes. A leaf or twig might be gone in a day or a week.

Due to the heat and humidity, organic material quickly decays and release their nutrients. The dense webbing of feeder roots just below the surface are in a life-or-death battle to grab those nutrients before some other tree does or (unlikely) the nutrient is leached out of the reach of the roots.

The red, clay soils in the southeastern United States have many similarities with the soils in the tropics. 

How to manage gardens in red, clay soils

Image courtesy of Wikipedia

Mimic what works in nature. Red, clay soils are very similar to the soils under tropical forests.

That is easier than you think because you have probably been fighting it. 

Stop being anal about eliminating "weeds", at least in the places where you haven't planted yet. That mat of Crabgrass (in the summer), Dead-nettles, Chickweed and volunteer turnips (in the cooler months) are busy keeping the nutrients in the biosphere. And since you cannot effectively bank it in the soil as humus, then that is really you only alternative.

Nutrient cycling as "an economy"

Economists look at two numbers when assessing the health of an economy: The money supply (the number of dollars in circulation) and the velocity-of-money.

Injecting funds into the economy by giving benefits to poor people has more POP! than giving it to wealthy people. Poor people don't hoard the money. They run out and spend it. Wealthy people are much more likely to park their money in bank accounts or bonds which doesn't keep the money in the high-velocity parts of the economy.

As a gardener or orchardist living in places with red, clay soils or blow-sand, you need to stop thinking of yourself as a banker but as a scheduler who makes sure that there is always a line of customers waiting to grab those nutrients before they leach away.