Three hours time-on-task, five hours by the clock

I was blessed to be able to have three hours time-on-task today. 

Grafting notes

I performed the first few grafts of the season. Mrs ERJ applauded, not because I am a fabulous grafter but because it means the sticks in the refrigerator that were elbowing aside (actual) food are starting to leave the refrigerator.

Two Walnut Hill pears. Walnut Hill is a Lucky Pittman find. In Michigan it has fruit slightly smaller than tennis balls that persist on the tree until April. In fact, they would still be hanging if they hadn't been harvested by hungry squirrels.

Two "Indian Free" Blood* peaches in the upper orchard.

Two "King David"** apples on a Hazen/M-26 tree that tried to pay its rent but it fruits in the heat of the summer and then quickly turn mushy and then drop.

Two Ashmead's Kernel***. One on the apple tree in the northwest corner of the Upper Orchard. The other on a sucker on the "tall" Melrose tree.

Both Ashmead's Kernel and King David have a lot of flavor-intensity. That is, high sugar, high acid, lots of "apple" flavor. Melrose is a work-horse for production but the apples, though large and pretty, are a bit bland. My hope is to have some apples to balance out the applesauce or cider made from the Melrose apples. 

Mark my words...

If somebody doesn't put a stop to this nonsense then I will have to mow my grass before May 1st!

Miscellaneous

I cleaned out and reset the varmint traps. I replaced the rotted-out sill of an exterior door with Type S mortar (guaranteed not to rot). I dug holes and spread fertilizer. I sprayed herbicide. I dragged brush.
 

* (Indian Free Peach) produces heavy crops of large, aromatic, freestone peaches that have dark red skin and white flesh marbled with crimson stripes. When fully ripe in mid-to-late season, the rich, sweet, distinctive flavor is excellent both eaten fresh and used in preserves, chutneys and fruit leathers.  Raintree Nursery description

** For best flavor (King David) fruit should be harvested as soon as it is fully colored, but if left on the tree the apples will hang into the winter and the color will continue to deepen until it is almost black. The flesh is yellowish; its intensely tart flavor explodes with spice, citrus, and tropical notes that are deepened by caramelized sugars. The intensity can be a bit of a shock. It will store well for about two months, and will make an amazing pie, sauce, or cider.     Description from Cummins Nursery

*** Biting into an Ashmead's reveals a dense, nutty flesh bursting with honeyed zing. The flavor is intense and complex, high in both sugar and acid, and the juice is prized by cider makers. Steve Wood of Farnum Hill Ciders describes Ashmead's as "a delicious trip to that fine line between pleasure and pain," and he finds that it adds "mad florals" and tropical notes to cider blends. While the acidity of the fresh-picked fruit might not agree with some tastes, Ashmead's mellows with age, and an October harvest is best stored for eating around Christmas, when notes of pear, spice, and orange blossom will emerge.  Description from Cummins Nursery

ArkStorm 2.0

Article

I like a good Doomer story as well as the next fellow, however, I think the authors focus overly-much on Sacramento and the Central Valley.

The idea of an Ark Storm where multiple storm-cells go barreling down the same track in rapid succession is not unprecedented.

On January 10, 1862, Leland Stanford was inaugurated as the governor of California, traveling by rowboat to the ceremony due to severe flooding in Sacramento. The Great Flood of 1862 had caused extensive damage and disruption across the state. 

The difference between then and now is that men built so many structures in areas that are subject to extreme-but-infrequent flooding. To me, the more exciting story is in Los Angeles County. Of particular interest are choke-points:

East end of the San Fernando Valley

 

Culver City

Whittier Narrows

While the water might get deeper above these choke-points, the water velocity will make these places more dangerous than the places with deeper water. 

Another area of concern are where limited access roads are sub-grade.

Sleeper-cells and Florida

I am very pleasantly surprised by the low level of Iranian "sleeper-cell" activity in the US during the past month.

I am not saying that "They are not here". Clearly, there are many people in the US with sympathy for the former Iranian government.

I am saying that I am grateful for whatever reasons (non-permissive environment, phantom threat, LE activities, hardened-infrastructure, loss-of-zealotry due to prosperity...) that we have not seen much.

If this were a basketball game, the commenter would be saying something like "The other team has been denied easy layups for the first five minutes" and nothing more. 

Kubota in Florida

This is Kubota's "big trip".

We offered to take him on a trip anywhere in the US after he graduated from high school. He said he would rather have us buy parts for his truck.

Kubota does not like crowds. He doesn't like frenzied activity around him. He hates airports.

He and his buddies drove down and they should be arriving somewhere near Daytona this morning. 

Scion sale

Cummins Nursery has a 40% off sale on their scion. The price they charge for a single scion is and eyewatering $12. Ordering three of a single variety brings it down to $8 per stick. 40% off drops that to a tolerable $4.20 a stick. Use code ROOTSCLEAR at checkout to get the discount. 

On a personal note

The pulled/strained muscle on the right side of my neck/shoulders is mostly resolved. I can now quickly glance to my left which is a wonderful thing when driving.

After three days of doing nothing, I was able to do slow, gentle "static" stretches. That helped a lot. 

Redemption, five minutes before midnight

 

Looking east over the lower half of the potato patch. Personally, I think this is a very "artsy" photograph.

There I was, moping. I just could not pry myself out of the recliner. The sky was gray. I had a heating pad on my neck. We were at the end of a (nominally) five-day dry spell even though my location had a 0.2" rain squall the day before yesterday.

I had planned to till the garden but I had checked with a shovel and the soil was too wet, too soft.

The longest spell without rain in the ten-day look-ahead is two days, and I need three honest dry days to be able to get onto the garden with the tiller.

Finally, while Mrs ERJ was off on errands, I extricated myself from the recliner (which has a tiny fragment of a Black Hole in the frame, thereby creating an anomaly in the gravitational field) and half-heartedly toured the orchards and garden. The sun had FINALLY come out five minutes before midnight, so to speak.

My plan was nothing more than to start mapping out all of the woodchuck holes. 

Then my luck turned

I stumbled across three feedlot panels that did I did not recall that I owned. SCORE! Then Mrs ERJ joined me and helped lift the 16' by 52" panels out of the weeds and the back-fill from a woodchuck hole.

Walking past the 2026 potato patch (about 4000 square-feet) I lamented that it had been too wet to till. Mrs ERJ peered at it and observed..."It looks drier now."

I looked at it and she was right.

Then Mrs ERJ said "It is 7:00 and it doesn't get dark until 8:30. Maybe it would cheer you up if you tilled some of it?".

I cautiously tilled the top half of the patch where I expected it to be drier.

Then I tilled the bottom half.

The hardest part was getting started. 

As I returned the tiller to the barn I saw Mrs ERJ trimming grape vines. I was wearing a tee-shirt and jeans. She was bundled up in a parka and a knit cap. We looked like we were two or three USDA zones apart.

Hemp products for old dogs

Zeus is struggling this week. He forgets that he is old. He gets excited and starts jumping and then his hips remind him that 12 year-old German Shepherds shouldn't do stupid stuff like that.

For a dog of Zeus's size, he is supposed to get three of these a day. Link

Quicksilver and I went on a "field trip" to the local pet store and purchased a "hemp" product advertised to help old-dogs with joint issues.

The results have been promising. His mobility is much better after three of the chews and he is barking at the pretty, young Labradoodle that is walked down the road.

I am not sure they are appropriate for dogs with impaired kidney function. They are very salty and taste like ginger.

Tagetes

Tagetes is the genus name for a group of plants that include the common "Marigold". 

It also includes a couple of plants used in Latin America as flavoring for beans and other staple dishes. Tagetes lucida has many names, one of which is "Mexican Tarragon". French Tarragon is difficult to propagate from seeds and "Mexican Tarragon" is close enough in flavor for many people and the seed germinate with abandon.

Tagetes minuta is commonly used in Andean cuisine and is sometimes called Huacatay or Black Mint. It is now grown world-wide as a seasoning.

The reason I mention this is that I was looking at my seedling trays and was struck by the fact that 90% of the seedlings are of species that originated in the Western Hemisphere with the Happy Rich broccoli being the single exception. The other "A-Ha!" was that I was growing three species of Tagetes...Tagetes erecta (aka "African marigold"), Tagetes lucida and Tagetes minuta.

Pakistan: Rock-star of Southwest Asia?

 

European nations are unwilling to risk their equipment and men defending free navigation of the Straights of Hormuz

So, Pakistan to the rescue.

I didn't see that coming.

On the other hand, India and Pakistan are getting monkey-hammered by the abrupt shutdown of mid-East oil. Pakistan is a Muslim country which buys them some credibility with what remains of the Iranian leadership. Furthermore, Pakistan is downwind of Iran and likely to get a cloud of radioactive dust should things continue to escalate. 

I imagine that they are already getting a flood of Shia refugees...Shia and Sunni have a history of friction. Pakistan is not in a position to receive 10 million destitute and angry Shia refugees.

Europe stepped down. Pakistan stepped up.

Silver and Tomato plants

I received a sixty pound delivery in the mail. When my mail-lady asked about it, I told her the small box held silver dollars. Of course, it didn't.

I am now regretting my joking about that. People will believe the stupidest stuff. The melt value of silver coins is running about $1000 a pound.

An image that caught my attention

Tomatoes are the "Weebles" of the plant world. You can lay them down when you transplant them but they defiantly pop-to attention overnight.

I was walking past the room with the seedling tomatoes when the elegantly luminous "glow" of the vertical stems caught my attention. The backlighting caused the hairs on the stems (called "pubescence" by botanists) to illuminate the stems while the dark soil behind the stems created a stark contrast.

Shortly after Mrs ERJ and I were married, one of Mrs ERJ's friends visited. I was not there at the time, but Mrs ERJ shared that her friend almost broke down into tears when she saw the tomato seedlings growing on the window sill. In fact, her eyes got very, very moist after brushing her hands over them and the distinctive smell of tomato plants hit her nose.

She and her husband had been "homesteaders" and they busted their behinds to make it work. Things happened. She was no longer married. She lived in a nicer house now but...it just wasn't the same. Smells are the most evocative sense. We can filter out sounds and ignore visual backgrounds and endure pain...but smells defy filtering.

Some more thoughts on fertilizer

I once read that the "real cost" of a gallon of fuel delivered to a Forward Operating Base in Afghanistan was in the neighborhood of $400 a gallon.

That seems insane to somebody in the US who is pumping $4/gallon gasoline into their Toyota. It reeks of corruption and incompetence until you start looking at the cost structure.

Start at $4.50 per gallon in southern Pakistan. Then apportion out the cost of maintaining "sanitized" routes through unsecured territory. Also apportion the cost of equipment that is damaged (blown-up, bullet-holes shot through the walls of the tank, damaged tires). Also add in the cost of the security detail that accompanies each fuel delivery along with the real depreciation to their equipment.

Suddenly, $400 a gallon does not seem so outlandish. It is certainly much less expensive than illegal drugs in the US (which are expensive for many of the same reasons).

Fertilizer

Fertilizer has a less hazardous trip from the dock in Louisiana to the cells in the plant you are growing...but there are costs.

The point I want to emphasize is that if you lost a 10,000 gallons of diesel in the outskirts of Islamabad you were out $45,000. If you lost that same 10,000 gallons 500 meters from the Forward Operating Base you were out $4,000,000 because the "cost" incurred between Islamabad and the FOB were squandered.

While the fertilizer is in your care, the bag can tear or you can put it in a damp place and have it turn into a rock or it can get rained on and leached into soil.

The fertilizer you sprinkle onto the soil can be washed away by excessive rains, it can be immobilized by drought (the roots requiring that the nutrients be dissolved in water before they can absorb them), the nutrients can be poached by weeds or the weeds can suck the moisture out of the soil thereby making the nutrients unavailable.

Some gardeners are casual about weeds, saying that the nutrients are still in the garden...and while that is mostly true, those nutrients are NOT available to the plant you are growing and are counting on to feed you. Disclosure: I favor using plants like turnips and rye to capture nutrients during the "off" season when I don't have other food-plants actively growing. But pay attention to the fact that the "weeds" I use for that particular purpose are edible and they can function as a safety-net if things get really spicy. 

Some forms of nitrogen like urea and ammonia will vaporize at high temperatures (again pointing to the wisdom of managing you soil moisture as an integral part of your fertilizer management).

In the soil, some nutrients bind to iron or aluminum ions if the pH is "wrong". You might have an abundance of phosphorous (for instance) and adding more will not help you nearly as much as addressing the issue with pH.

Even after the nutrients managed to dodge flood, drought, greedy weeds, bad chemistry and get into your plant, they can be lost to the plant collapsing due to a stem-disease or a hungry rabbit or deer munching the leaves. Or to cabbage worms or tomato worms or a host of other pests. At this point, you are in the same situation as the FOB that watched the tanker truck take a direct hit from a mortar round 500 meters from the wall. So close. So very, very close.

Fortunately, the events that are "most expensive" in terms of lost nutrients are the ones that are most under the control of the gardener. We can put up fences to deter virtually all animals smaller than elk and moose. We can choose disease resistant varieties and space them out to foster good air-flow. We can control the insect pests.

Weeds deserve a special note. Weeds are not "just another plant". The plants in your garden divert significant amounts of carbohydrates and protein into the food you are going to harvest. Weeds, on the other hand, do not have to "pay" those costs. They grow more quickly. Their roots plunge more deeply into the soil. Their roots have more surface area and so on. Given that your food-plants are operating under a significant handicap, you need to put a very aggressive thumb-on-the-scale to even things out. Remember, weeds short-stop nutrients by stealing them, by sucking the soil dry, by shading your enfeebled plants and by getting a head-start, time-wise, in your garden.

Moving a step away from the garden along the supply chain, timing the application of fertilizers so that they are just entering the root zone as the plants are unfurling their canopy is good business. The plants cannot "pull" nutrients unless they have leaves transpiring water. No leaves, no movement of the nutrients into the plants. The longer the nutrients are in the soil before the plant can pull them in, the greater the losses due to leaching and weeds (which had a head-start).

A step farther up the supply chain, treat the bags of fertilizer (or shovelfuls of manure) gently. Put them on a pallet off of the ground and under a roof that will keep the rain off of it. If you have mice, have a plan to control them lest they chew holes in the bags.

About that nitrogen that leached...

Suppose you have animals and you have been dumping the stable-waste in a pile. If you have been doing it for a while, that pile might be 8' high, 15' wide and 50' long.

Most annuals that we grow in gardens are fairly shallow rooted as noted in the paragraph where I discussed weeds.

However, there is a huge amount of variability. Some perennials like asparagus and horseradish have roots that plunge more than 10' deep (assuming the water table is deeper than that and they don't hit bedrock).

Many varieties of grapes have roots that run deep as do pears, figs and mulberries.

Another possibility is to plant species that are heavy users of nitrogen and use the leaves or cuttings from them as mulch. Or, use them as forage/bedding for your animals and THEN use them for mulch.

Bonus images