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

 

Fine Art Tuesday

Ecce Homo (Behold the man)

Antonio Ciseri was born in Ronco sopra Ascona, a municipality near Locarno in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland around 5 kilometers along the shore north of the border with Italy. It lies on the northern shore of Lake Maggiore. He was born in 1821 and died in Florence, Italy in March of 1891.

The work shown above is his masterpiece. It was commissioned twenty years before he finished it. He completed the year that he died.

 

A tip of the hat to 10x25mm for suggesting this painter.

Changes in writing styles

Mrs ERJ belongs to a "Book Club". They are all "ladies" in the finest sense of the word.

This month's book was written about 100 years ago and Mrs ERJ commented that the text is much richer in adjectives than "modern" novels.

Having a short window of time, I looked into the matter.

A Master's student in North Macedonia wrote a thesis on the topic. He determined that the text of the book that the fine ladies of Eaton Rapids are studying is only 6% adjectives which is LOWER than most modern fiction (which runs between 6% and 12% of text).

Where the 100 year-old book differs from modern writing is that 57% of the adjectives are unique and only used once in the book and a disproportionate share of them are "compound adjectives". 

Instead of choosing to describe a vehicle as "a yellow car" the author chose to write  "It was a rich cream color, bright with nickel, swollen here and there in its monstrous length with triumphant hatboxes and supper-boxes and tool-boxes, and terraced with a labyrinth of windshields that mirrored a dozen suns."

There are also dances of adjectives and adverbs that paint scenes in great detail "...fading lamp light slanting across the fluttering muscles in the fair maiden's arms..." kind of thing.

The descriptive language in the old novel is not the stylized, formulistic, and boringly repetitive bridges between action-scenes ala Marvel comic books. Those action-bridges are as invisible to the reader and as forgettable as "...he said..." in dialogue. The descriptive language in the 100 year-old novel is more like a series of meticulously composed sets in a movie where Chekhov's Gun guides the reader as he anticipates future events.

Survivor bias

There was a lot of dreck written in that era. The "nickel" cowboy novels are examples of that. Writers who had never been west of the Hudson river churned out vast numbers of novels that have since been forgotten. The few examples of that genre that are still available were written by authors who had actually been cowboys or who had spent time "out west" as hunters.

Stepping back a few paces, I have to wonder if our current style of frenetic action will look dated to future readers. Fashions change. The pendulum swings.

Herding cats

 

Busy herding cats. Read the fine folks in the side-bar

A prayer before Easter feast

We celebrated Easter with my sister and our extended family.

There were five children (all girls) in attendance and three of my nieces have-a-bun-in-the-oven and are due in October, November and December.

It was a warm, loud party with too much food and not enough time to talk with everybody.

My younger brother said grace before we ate. It went something like this:

"Rather than read a prayer, I want to share a story that might have happened. I am not saying it did...but that it could have happened.

After Jesus sent out his disciples two-by-two, what did he do? Did he sit on his hands?

More likely he found a poor down-on-its-luck village. The residents were probably old and tired. The soil was worn out and the water smelled bad. Nobody had any new clothing because cloth was dear.

Walking into the village would cause a crowd to gather, because it was the kind of village that people left and never came back to.

Jesus might have started talking. He might have told the crowd to look at the person to their left, and then to their right. To look at the person in front of them and the person behind them.

Then he would have challenged them. "The people around you are rich" he might have said.

Of course, the crowd would have told him that he was crazy. 

At that point, Jesus would have reminded them..."Do you remember when your wife was sick and your neighbor brought you and your children hot food to eat? Do you remember the time you were harvesting in the heat of the day so you could beat the thunderstorms and your neighbor's child brought you a jug of water? Do you remember the time when your mother died and even though she was a sharp-tongued woman, every neighbor visited you to console you on your loss?"

Most of the people in the crowd nodded in agreement.

"And didn't you do the same for your neighbors? When the fire in the rich man's house went out, did you charge him for an ember to relight it or did you give it freely? Did you begrudge the beggar the heal of your loaf or the copper coin that had been give to you as a gift? No, you did not."

"Amen I tell you. You are all rich men for you have seen my face every day of your life, both when you rendered aid to those in need and when you graciously accepted help from your family and neighbors. That is true riches...not gold, not barns full of grain...but to have seen the face of God in your fellow man and to have lived."

(Modified from Matthew 25:31-46)

After pondering this "prayer", I think one of the hardest things for us as members of our culture is for us to look at anybody that society tells us is "richer" than we are or "more successful" and to see them as fellow humans who, at times, need to be ministered to, who need compassion from their fellow man.

Everybody has struggles with health and family. Anybody with a brain has some degree of anxiety about the future. We can only guess at the pain and loneliness of the super-model who only attracts predator/users and whose "friends" are only interested in digging up something to gossip about. We can only guess at the pain of people who are ten or a hundred or a thousand times wealthier than we are, people who have family members who stab them in the back out of a warped sense of vengeance or whose children fall prey to drugs or perverts.

It is easy to feel compassion towards a kid who has Downs Syndrome. That kid affirms our sense of superiority and our status in the world. Isn't that the entire nexus of AWFULs (Affluent White Female Urban Liberals)? They champion "the oppressed" so that they can simultaneously feel righteous and smug. AWFUL is a clumsy repackaging of Kipling's "White Man's Burden".

Bonus pictures

A family in Ukraine close to "the front". They are making dumplings. Look at the books! How many families have the collected works of H.A. Hekpacob? Source

The young woman had to walk two miles to buy the eggs used to make the dumplings. This family is not rich in the material sense but they HAVE been blessed with wealth.

Vegetable seedlings, Rain, Turkeys and Figgy Duff

 

The roller-rack that Mrs ERJ suggested that I purchase for starting garden seeds. I have 5000 lumen shop-lights attached to the bottoms of two of the shelves.

30 Stupice tomatoes on the left side of the tray (pigmented stems) and 20 Rose de Bern on the right side.

25 broccoli seedlings in the back and 25 Federle tomato seedlings in the foreground

Some lovage seeds sulkily germinating. The articles on the internet say to expect 7-to-10 days before they show any signs of life.

Rain

We picked up another 2" of rain today for a seven-day total of 3.5" of rain. 

Turkey season

Kubota, alas, is a bird hunter. You do your best and try to guide your children in the paths of righteousness...and what do they do? 

$20 a shell. The economy shells are still $1.50 a shell

Wild Turkeys were hunted to the point of total expatriation extirpation in Michigan by farmers using 12 (1-1/4 oz), 16 (1 oz) and 20 gauge, (7/8 oz) paper-shelled shotgun loads of #6 shot fired through single-shot firearms with full chokes. Modern turkey are make of Kevlar and reactive armor and require exotic loads. Not.

The issue is that the 1930s farmer knew the range limitations of his weapon and ammo. It doesn't take rocket-science to put a turkey into the stew-pot if you restrict your maximum range to 30 yards. BUT...if you are shooting for long beards and want to reach out to 45 or 50 yards...yeah, you are going to have to drop the big dollars. 

From the Hodgdon Reloading website

I have some #5 shot, 3"Fiocchi hulls, Longshot powder and appropriate wads for 1-7/8oz loads (about 320 pellets of #5). 

I am feeling an urge to help Kubota out in the ammo department. It would be pretty cool to mimic the Federal Flitecontrol shells...they pattern very densely. Cool, but not necessary. He will be throwing twice as much mass downrange as a standard 20 gauge and (I think) he has a Red Dot scope so he should be able to center the pattern on the head with precision.

For what it is worth, he is in the market for a used semi-auto 12 gauge shotgun. Goose, duck and turkey loads have a lot of recoil and semi-autos take some of the bite out of them. Frankly, I think he should save a little bit longer and purchase a new Silver Eagle or similar product. But what do I know?
 

Bonus video

AI content 

This is for my four readers from Canada. One of you has a wife whose family came from the Maritime provinces. You might want to jump ahead to the 17:30 mark.

You cannot make this stuff up

"Why don't you look at me when I am talking?" Mrs ERJ asked as we walked around the track. We were walking our daily 40 minutes at a local track. We were going counter-clockwise and I was in the outside lane.

"I think I pulled a muscle in my neck or shoulder and cannot turn my head to the left" I replied.

"How did you do that?" she asked.

I pondered whether to share that information or not. Finally, I decided to share, pride-be-damned.

"I think I pull that muscle while I was napping" I replied.

"What???" Mrs ERJ said with surprise.

"I was dreaming that I was crossing a road and about to get hit by a bunch of cars. So I leaped toward the other side. Unfortunately, my right arm was trapped underneath me and didn't move" I summarized.

Bonus images

 

Dude(?) on left is the father in one of the videos Quicksilver was watching.