Acorns and daffodils

 

Acorns in the bottom of the bucket. Those roots complicate planting them.

These are blooming in some of the local roadside ditches.

Like many white flowers, they are fragrant in a heavy, sweet way. These flowers smell like Brassavola nodosa orchids

This flower matches Narcissus poeticus. It is reputed to be one of the few daffodils that tolerates wet locations. Like all daffodils, it is fairly deer resistant.

Today's work-ticket

Today's work-ticket is to go to the west side of the state and to clean-up the grave-sites of my paternal grandfather (who died in 1936) and my paternal grandmother (1996). Then we will visit a second, more rural cemetery where many other ancestors on that side of the family are buried.

We will eat lunch at a tavern that was started in 1933 and I will eat too much.

The venture (the trip, not just the visit at the tavern) will be an all-day affair. 

Quicksilver's musical moment

 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Fishing

Nikolay Bogdanov in Smolenks, Russia (approximately 230 miles west of Moscow) in 1868 and died in 1945. His style of art was frowned upon by the Soviet dictators, so he moved to Latvia and continued to paint. He died in Berlin during a bombing raid that destroyed the clinic that he was a patient in.

 

Sometimes, "Bored to death" is not hyperbole

 

We over-prepare for the glamorous and the "sexy".

We under-prepare for the mundane and boring. Being under-prepared for the boring can kill you.

The video at the head of this essay plods along. In some places it is boring. Diarrhea is boring. Chemistry is boring. Institutional memory is boring. History is boring. Logistics are boring.

My readers

I suspect that most of my readers are in our 50s, 60s and 70s . We are more fragile than we care to admit. The issues discussed in the video killed tens of thousands men in their prime and it incapacitated millions of those men. Many of those men worked in fields or factories 60 hours a week. They were tough men. And they were absolutely hammered into the dirt by bad water and sanitation.

Shigella Dysenteriae, just one of the dozens of bacteria that can give you diarrhea

May I simply suggest that it would be a simple prep to carry a gallon (or more) of clean water in your vehicle and to have the means to filter/sanitize local water should the need arise? And don't just buy it and pitch it behind the seat of your truck. Buy TWO of them and try them out on some local water so you are not shocked by how it tastes.

Clostridioides difficile is notable for the foul stench of the "output"

And then...think about Oral Rehydration Solution for when you or a loved-one does get the Johnny-trots. Most "sports electrolyte" drinks don't have enough salt and have too much sugar.  You can get close if you take 3/4-scoop of powdered Gatorade and add 1/4 teaspoon of table salt per quart(liter) of water. You need the salt. Your body will not allow your body to retain water if it knocks your cation:anion:water equilibrium out of balance.

The case for having a response-plan for diarrhea is that there are situations when contact with raw sewage is unavoidable. Some of those situations, like flooding, can expose very large numbers of people, possibly enough to overwhelm local medical resources

I am not trying to play "doctor" here. My goal is to keep you out of the ditch long enough for you to get to the doctor. Even though dehydration and raging diarrhea is sufficient reason to call 911 and get an ambulance ride...how many of you are actually going to make that call? Right. I thought so. None of us.

You are going to try to finish what you are doing, take one final trip to the latrine, put three folded-up towels on the seat of your F-150/Silverado/RAM and then drive yourself to the E-Room.

Today's view from the office

 

Looking south. Uphill.

Looking east. Looking across a gully or small valley.

Looking north, downhill. The Autumn Olive are just starting to bloom.

Looking into a bucket. These are pecan seed-nuts, cv. "Goosepond".

Three hours time-on-task.

Shifting gears in the garden

Overflowing! I water them in our walk-in shower. I move each tray to the shower and use the hand-held shower-head.

Looking ahead at the calendar for this week I have obligations every day except today: Field trips, picking up fingerling fish, birthday parties and a trip to distant cemeteries. I might be able to wiggle out of the field trip and that will give me two days when I can work.

The heavy blue line at the bottom of the chart is 32F

I moved some of the seedling trays outside. I put them in the sun in the morning and then move under an over-hang at night where there is slight protection from the frost. We might be past the danger of frost but the ambient temperatures are not conducive to rapid plant growth. The air is cold. The soil is cold.

The Mexican Tarragon (Tagetes minuta) that I interplanted between the blackberry starts are very visible after transplanting most of the blackberries

In spite of those issues, I moved some perennials out of seedling trays into their permanent homes this weekend. I also watered various 2026 transplants (blackberries, gooseberries, asparagus, iris, lovage, rhubarb) since our total rainfall for May has been 0.0 inches. That has been great for the farmers racing to plant their fields. It isn't so good for tiny plants that have been transplanted. Tiny plants have tiny roots that can't reach deeply into the lower, wetter soil horizons.

Today, God willing, I will be planting acorns and pecan seed-nuts. I expect it to be slow going because I will be planting into unmown sod. 

Time marches onward

 

I used sand from Quicksilver's sandbox to cover the seeds. That is why many of the cells have a tan blotch in the middle of them.

Do you see that bit of bright-red slightly above the center of the frame? That is a beet seedling.

The "Merlin" beet seeds planted May 6 are starting to pop up. Five days elapsed time.

What an odd place for a woodchuck to take a nap.

We sometimes have mice in our attic. These professional mice models were compensated with peanut butter and raisins for this photo session.

Our house was built in the mid-1970s and has blown-in, cellulose (ground up newspapers) insulation. It is a pain to work around.

This is the best system I have used so far for trapping mice in the attic. The backbone is a stringer from a pallet. The traps are glued in place with yellow wood-glue.

If you ever fiddled with Designed for Assembly then you understand that rigid parts are much preferred to springy, flexible parts (like most wire harnesses).

One of the unexpected advantages of the slat that I used for the backbone is that it does not sink into the insulation.

Random factoid

The attendance at church today was about 40% higher than the norm. Today is Mother's Day and perhaps some of the mothers in the congregation suggested that accompanying them to Mass would bring them joy.

I don't think any arms were twisted and I saw no evidence that any frozen hearts were thawed. But at least 45 souls who do not regularly hear the words in the Bible attended church and heard readings from Acts, Psalms, 1 Peter and John in Charlotte, Michigan.

The words can fall like rain but if the hearts choose to remain frozen it will be to no avail. They will run off like rain on frozen soil. But the words DID fall like rain and their ears heard even if their hearts filtered it out.

I was told that Chimney Swifts (the bird) build their nests by taking a tiny gob of mud in their beaks and hurling at the place where they want their nest. Invariably, the first attempt fails. The pellet bounces off, but its impact removes some of the lichens, algae and tarnish from the brick (or wall of the cave). Perhaps fifty or a hundred or two-hundred attempts are tried and each fails. Each attempt prepares the site for eventual success, like successive passes of a plow prepares the field for the seed.

And then...a pellet of clay sticks. And then another...and another. Success builds upon success.

But is the 201st attempt any more noble or necessary than the first, the fifty-first, the hundred-and-first or the hundred-and-ninety-ninth?

No, it is not. And so the mothers and grandmothers tell the souls that have been entrusted to them "It will give me great joy if you go to church with me on Mother's Day this year." 

They do their part.

The Holy Spirit will do His part.

The lost lamb? Well, every story is different. 

Science done right

I am feeling pretty beaten up today. There is a bug going around according to Southern Belle and the maple pollen counts are high.

As I sat in the official blogging chair of the Eaton Rapids Joe blog, I dipped into the internet and stumbled across an example of "good" science.

Background

In the 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union, a delegation of scientists from the US surveyed the mountains of Central Asia east of the Aral Sea basin. Scientist hypothesize that these mountains are the ancestral home of modern, domestic apples. Dried fruit and seeds moved westward along the migration and trading routes and interacted with native species in Asia Minor and Europe. The small number of seeds in the original migration was seen as a genetic bottleneck.

It was speculated that there could be all kinds of useful genes in the larger population the progenitors of the original apples (called Malus sieversii), genes that could be very useful in terms of disease and insect resistance, resistance to cold (temperatures sometimes hit -40F in the mountains), drought and salt.

The first expeditions were in 1995 and 1995. There were FORESTS of wild apple trees, many of them bearing fruit of very high quality. Seeds were harvested by the hundreds, even thousands. Scion for grafting was collected from the elite specimens to be propagated in the United States. 

Magazine articles were written and illustrated with pictures of these wild orchards and bear tracks and bear poop.

TV interviews were made on PBS and BBC and Discovery channels.

It was a Very Big Deal. It was the botanical version of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

...and then...

DNA testing became an everyday tool in the lab and scientists started looking at the samples the expeditions brought back.

It seems likely that various товарищ (komrades) had moved commercial orchards into the wild forests as a way to avoid the heavy hand of the central government. Interspersing the domestic apple trees with the wild M. sieversii not only hid the production from the authorities, it resulted in hybrids between the two and those progeny were the ones that most attracted the eyes of the expedition.

Rabbit-hole details

The DNA data had enough resolution to (usually) identify the parents or grandparents of the samples tested.

In order of frequency mentioned, those varieties are

• Alexander (Ukrainian apple)
• Golden Reinette (from Denmark or England depending on where you ask)
• Charlamoff (perhaps "Charlamowsky" a Duchess of Oldenburg type apple)
• Rosmarina Bianca (an apple from northern Italy)
• Golden Pearmain (possibly from southeastern US)
• Lowland Raspberry (Russian)
• Yellow Transparent (Russian)
•  
• ....Mostly onesie-twosies after this... 
•  
• Reinette Simirenko (Ukrainian)
• Zigeunerapfel (oldest known apple cultivar from Germany)
• Gragylling (Sweden)
• Gross de Saint Clement (Belgium, maybe)
• Kuron Kitaika (Russian/Ukrainian, a hybrid of M. domestica x M. prunifolia)
• Spasovka Kvasna (Russian. Kvasna is Russian for hard cider)
• Kostlicher (Golden Delicious?  West Virginia)
• Weisser Tafelapfel (German)
• Yellow Bellflower (New Jersey or possibly Cornwall, England)

What tickles me about this information is that the scientists involved simply reported the data. They didn't point fingers. They didn't trash-talk. They simply updated the reports with addendums. They had tools that the scientists in 1995 did not have. And frankly, the scientists who were on the expedition were aware that "introgression of genes from Malus domestica" was a very real possibility. The apples they were finding were simply too good to be true.

Another perspective is that this is analogous to the post on the feral apple orchards of Ontario. Those orchards were over-represented by seedlings with Tolman Sweet and Wealthy ancestry. The wild orchards in Kzakistan were even more heavily over-represented by seedlings with Alexander, Golden Reinette and Charlamoff ancestry. 

Plant update

If you look closely, you will notice that the plants are growing in shallow water.

Walmart had these at very attractive prices and the plants arrived in good shape.

Two more packages were delivered today. One held a gooseberry plant, cv. Tixia. The "Tixia" I purchased last year turned into a currant bush. The other package held 9 Louisiana Iris plants cv. Ann Chowning.