Personal space: Duck Edition

All four ducklings made it through the night alive.

This morning they were getting trained on "personal space". The ducklings were raised in a crowded pen and their idea of personal space is much less than that of the girls with seniority.

Ducks are gregarious animals. They find safety in flocks (or "rafts" when they are on the water). They have a natural desire to be close to each other, but how close is variable that depends on the environment.

It looks to me like the senior girls are setting up a zone-defense as one might see in the game of basketball. They want a certain amount of space between each player...not too much but not too close, either.

My guess is that there is an optimum range between ducks when they march abreast foraging. That is, each duck has a lane that she can efficiently forage and she will not tolerate another duck cutting into that lane.

As she marches up that lane, she shoves her bill beneath every wad of vegetation, under every dirt clod, under every board...searching for snails, slugs, centipedes, cut-worms and other tasty bits of protein. That said, the lane is something like 12"-to-18" wide, which is about twice as far as she can reach by pivoting her body and extending her neck.

For those of you who have studied defensive warfare, those lanes are analogous to "fields of fire". There is a certain amount of overlap that is desirable but too much overlap defeats the purpose. 

Today's work-ticket

Stretch a short fence across the middle of the fenced in garden. The beans are starting to come up and I don't think they will survive the ducks. I anticipate that I can dispense with the fence in about 10 days. By then, the beans should be tall enough and well enough rooted to brush-off the duck's foraging.

Ducks, rain and durable clothing

 

I purchased four straight-run, Khaki Campbell ducks. My intention is to go from 2 Rouen and one Khaki Campbell to all KC ducks.

The male (called a "drake" in the business) wss acting very aggressively toward the ducklings. He is spending the night in a dog-crate while all of the girls (until proven otherwise) spend the night together. When I left the girls, the two grown-up were schooling the newbies on the pecking order.

Odds of all four ducklings being male are (1/2)^4 or about 6%. Odds of them being all female are the same. So there is an 88% chance that the four new ducks are of mixed sexes and I will have a flock of both KC ducks (i.e. girls) and I will keep one drake. 

Speaking of which. One of Southern Belle's male rabbits gave birth this morning. She had assumed Bingo was a boy based on what the seller told her...she never checked.

 

Looking up the rows of the potato patch.

We had about a half-inch of rain today and the weather-weenies promise another half-inch tomorrow. We needed it. That will bring our total May rainfall up to about 1.5"

If you zoom in and look for a horizontal row of tiny green sprinkles across the center of the frame, you will see that the rutabaga seeds are up.

How long will well cared-for clothes last? 

I cajoled Mrs ERJ into modeling her favorite jacket for the blog.

This is her spring/fall, walk-in-the-woods and camping jacket. It is over 40 years old.

She also has a pair of sweat-pants and a matching sweat-shirt that is at least 38 years old.

One of Mrs ERJ's most endearing traits is that she values paid-for, reliability, quality and steadfast endurance over new-and-shiny.

Scarifying Black Locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) seeds 

I opted for the boiling water treatment, a method that still strikes me as impossible.

The literature from scholar.google.com suggested that 10-to-15 seconds of dumping the seeds into boiling water and then a quick cool-down by adding tap water. Then a 24 hour soak in water at room temperature was a good method.

The literature universally give soaking in concentrated sulfuric acid higher germination rates but boiling water is easier to come by.

I brought about one quart of water up to a boil in a 3 quart pot.  I dumped in 50 grams of Black Locust seeds that were harvested in 2024. Due to fiddling around, the time was closer to 15 seconds than 10 seconds.

I weighed the seeds after the 24 hours of soaking and they weighed 142 grams, so the impermeable seed-coats on most of the seeds were breached.

The seeds will be mixed into clay balls and planted in the next week. They are sitting in the refrigerator until that can happen. 

Harris said she would implement price controls during her campaign

Some people believe that price-controls could never happen in the United States.

However, Kamala Harris made enacting Federal Law to eliminate "price-gouging" a significant part of her campaign for President. The words she chose were slightly different, but she did that to "spin" the message into the most favorable, emotional light.

One of the enormous failings of the Soviet economy was the lack of a mechanism to address dire shortages. Suppose it is the start of planting season and an employee at the warehouse failed to put air and oil filters into the delivery for the tractors. In a market-economy, the maintenance boss would call around to other farms to see who had extra filters. Then he would hand a trusted mechanic whatever amount of money it took to buy the filters and the keys to a truck.

24 hours later, the tractors would be out in the fields planting...even if the maintenance boss had to pay a three-hundred percent mark-up.

The same thing happens in every ice-storm in Michigan. Ice-storms might be 300 miles long but they are rarely much more than 50 miles wide due to the narrow temperatures which allow them to happen.

All of the generators at the big-box stores sell out in a heart-beat due to power-outages.

Enterprising people hop into their pickup trucks and drive 75 miles to Indiana or Ohio and buy as many generators as will fit in the bed of their truck. Then they go back home and put an ad in Facebook Marketplace "GENERATORS, New in Box" and list them for twice the normal selling price.

If any are left, they drive them back to where they bought them and return them for a refund.

So, if you basement is flooding because your sump-pump isn't pumping, or if you have an emotionally fragile kid going bananas...you cheerfully pay an extra $600 to have a generator delivered to your door while you calm your kid and keep humping buckets of water up the stairs and dumping it outside.

Let me offer a third example: Suppose there was a petroleum tank-fire on the west coast. Allowing the price of fuel to free-float would price "marginal uses" out of economic reach. Manuel cannot afford to drive to his landscaping job and more business gets done via Zoom. If legislation and legal entanglement cripple the price mechanism, Manuel and Vern drive until the remaining tanks are empty and then ambulances and emergency generators fall silent for lack of fuel.

Will the WOKE Utopian Ideal be durable?

The WOKE ideology can be categorized as a "Utopian Fantasy".

Utopian Fantasies require that human nature change for them to survive more than twenty years (basically, the prime years of their founders).

Rosabeth Moss Kanter studied 91 "utopian communities that existed between 1780 and 1860. Very few of them lasted more than 33 years...however, some of them did.

...Kanter noted these groups' rituals and clear boundaries for membership, as well as the "commitment mechanisms" that utopians utilized: sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence. She concluded that the more that a utopian community asked of its members, the more cohesive and long-lasting it was.   -Wikipedia

I think it is worth pointing out that the durable utopian communities required EQUALITY of sacrifice, investment, renunciation, communion, mortification and transcendence in all of their membership.

The WOKE movement requires those commitment mechanisms but only of certain groups. Other groups are exalted and lionized and not required to wear the sack-cloth and ashes.

Based on the historical data, it seems likely that the WOKE movement will be viewed by future generations as a campy aberration much like praying to crystals, hippies, transcendental meditation, chakras and macrobiotic diets.

That will come to a great shock to the SJWs who sold their souls to join the movement.

Yesterday's work-ticket

Four rows. The ten feet of each row closest to the goats are planted to potatoes. The ten feet closest to the camera are planted to "Bodacious" sweet corn.

You might be asking why I am planting sweet corn after I have posted material suggesting it might not be the best vegetable when the SHTF.

The short answer is "It is what the customer asked for." If my efforts can change people so they think of themselves as successful gardeners, then it is pretty easy for them to change what they plant.
 

Funerals

The mom of one of my high school buddies passed away this week. Her funeral is tomorrow. She may be the last of that generation among my friends.

There were several unusual features about my high school experience. I attended Catholic schools and the various parishes fed into the same high school. The schools at those parishes ended at different grades. Some schools, like the one I went to, stopped after 6th grade. Others went to 8th grade. Consequently, I started attending "Central" in 7th grade while others joined in 8th grade and 9th grade.

That created interesting dynamics as cliques or tribes or posses absorbed additional people, expanded and divided.

I didn't have a single "best friend" 7th-through-12th grade. It changed as circumstances changed.

However, my friend whose mother's funeral is tomorrow was generally in my top-three from 9th until 12th grade and even into college.

The Information Superhighway before the Internet

Kids will be stunned to learn that the information superhighway existed in the 1970s before the internet was invented. We called it "The Library".

If, by chance, you were on good terms with the librarian, then you had a very-high bandwidth portal to that highway.

My friend's mother was the librarian at our high school.

Another quirk about my high school is that it embraced the idea that kids naturally sought the knowledge they need, just like kids always choose the most nourishing foods and most wholesome activities. We were expected to do our own class scheduling (preparing us for college, don't you know) and to master academic material and take tests at our own rate.

Somehow, I did not have a single English/Language/Compostion class during my high school career. I did, however, probably, set a record for the number of hours I spent in the library reading the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedias of Science and Technology (go ahead, ask me about boron nitride or T-T-T curves or the Kreb's cycle). I should not have been allowed to graduate but I think the academic advisors were embarrassed by my falling through the cracks and they were willfully blind to my deficiencies.

Even after graduating from high school, the librarian continued to influence my life. I was scheduled to graduate from Michigan State with a BS in Engineering in March of 1981. It was during the low-point in the business cycle (Jimmy Carter's malaise). More of my class got jobs in Texas than in Michigan.

However, about two months before I graduated, the librarian called my mom and told her to tell me "Call this number and say 'I have skills in Computer Aided Engineering'." The librarian's husband had connections.

I made that call and got that job and was able to stay close to family (which was a very high priority for me). 

And so, tomorrow, I will go to the visitation and then the funeral Mass. I will not say very much. My role will be similar to a neutron absorbing rod in a nuclear pile or sound absorbing panels in a room. I will be "background" just like when I was when I was one of those nameless, faceless bodies who was in the library as reliably as the furniture. 

Handsome Hombre's sweet corn patch

This is the kind of brush that covered Southern Belle's lot when they purchased it (although it was not in leaf)

Handsome Hombre and Southern Belle purchased their house in December, 2024. Most of the lot was covered with pucker-brush, an unholy mess of Asian Honeysuckle, Staghorn Sumac, Poison Ivy and Hawthorne. Based on the ring-counts, the land had been neglected for at least 13 years.

The brush was brush-hogged. Orchard trees were planted.

This year, they want to plant sweet corn* and potatoes between the trees of the orchard.

Brome grass and goldenrod. Orchard trees next to the tee-posts. The goldenrod will die if we keep mowing.

 

This is what it looks like about a week after being sprayed with glyphosate. You can see the yellowing of the strip closest to the camera compared to the deeper green of the unsprayed strip.

Even though the grass is essentially dead, it still pays to mow it before tilling so-as to not bind/clog the tiller blades.

There are stumps and roots that will defeat the tiller.

Big, ugly snags that will take years to rot away.

After the first pass going counter-clockwise. You don't have to be stupid to do work like this but it helps.

The second pass was done traveling clockwise and went much faster. I am so very, very glad that I did not have to dig this by hand.

This strip is approximately 20' across by 65' long. It will get four rows with 15' on the west end planted to potatoes and then four plantings of sweet corn (about a week apart) 10' each with the far end being melons and some winter squash. Turnip seed will be broadcast to provide greens through the early summer.  Handsome Hombre loves to eat fresh greens with his scrambled eggs.

Germinating watermelon seeds

Their plan for any excess harvest is to share with their neighbors and to take it to church and give it away. 

God willing, the potatoes and the first four, 10' rows of corn will go in tomorrow. 

Scarcely worth mentioning

One of my earlier posts was about farmers in South Africa not planting their fields because they did not expect the prices to cover the variable cost of planting.

What is not obvious is that the farmers, collectively, expect price controls or outright confiscation of their crops.

Any human with a brain knows that food prices will rise when there is scarcity. Food is not optional. It is not something we can decide "Well, I just won't buy any until prices come down." People will pay their last dollar to fill their belly.

ERGO: Farmers must know that the prices they will command will not go up. They must know that something will happen to short-circuit that supply/demand relationship. Either the currency will be debased to the point where the elevated prices will still be insufficient to cover next years costs or...the "market" will be perverted by the heavy-hand of the government, that is, price controls or confiscation-without-compensation of the harvest.

The only thing worse than food prices that are high is no food on the shelf. Farmers are not stupid. They can see the handwriting on the wall and are acting in their rational best-interest.

Mamdani might want to take a few notes. If his goal is to reduce food-deserts in NYC, then government run and subsidized grocery stores is not the answer (see "...perverted by the heavy-hand of the government..."). All of those dynamic, robust, grass-roots bodegas are going to dry up and blow away. 

 

* Bodacious sweet corn was selected primarily for its excellent seedling vigor. Many types of sweet corn struggle with uneven planting depth and less-than-ideal soil moisture and cooler temperatures. Bodacious isn't immune to those issues but seems to be better equipped than many other varieties to "power through" those issues. 

Marigolds, sweet peppers and watermelons

The cabbage seeds are up

And in a big surprise, some of the watermelon seeds I got from Lucky in 2021 are germinating. I kept them in the refrigerator but was still surprised when three of them popped up. Those 20 Watt germination mats are a marvel.

I got 20 Stocky Red Roaster pepper plants into the ground. I planted them in the potato patch beside the main aisle. South side of path, west end of the garden. 

Cucumber seedlings hardening-off outside. My apologies for the crappy light. I took these pictures late in the day.

Marigold plants along left side of frame. Tagetes minuta plants on far-side of fencing. Federle tomatoes planted next to fence on left so that I can train them up the fence on left side of the enclosure. Enclosure for night time for ducks dominating right side of frame. Yes, that is a truck-cap.

If things work out, Mrs ERJ will be able to sit in her favorite chair next to the window and see Crackerjack marigolds blooming in the garden. 

God willing, I will till the patch of ground Southern Belle intends to turn into a corn patch today. I will make an effort to take pictures.

I am not the only busy person

The people selling ducklings and barrels are a little slow getting back to me. Perhaps they are also busy planting gardens.

Quicksilver music

Quicksilver is more interested in music videos where there are women and/or children in them.

One interesting interpretation of this song is that narrow-minded town-folk are mocking a formerly beautiful, middle-aged woman who gave her life to Jesus during her prime. John 14:1-2