...suck the juice out of the stone...

 

Click HERE to skip the first minute of "artsy" introduction

A crazy Swiss dude going through his mid-life crisis decided to grow grapes in a hostile, inhospitable environment. 70% of the vines that he laboriously plants dies in the first year*.

He spends his winter dry-fitting stone walls and backfilling with "soil" that has so much stone in it that cannot be used for gravel roads.

Nearly all progress can be laid at the feet of crazy or desperate people. "Normal" people accept that there are a thousand inter-locking reasons for why things are exactly the way they are. Only a fool or a crazy person would fight that. 

Nearly all the interesting stories are at the margins and corners of society. Men heroically (perhaps Quixotically) striving to bend austere, stony  wilderness to the plow are such men-of-the-margin.

I am proud to call several such men and women my friends. 

*If it were me, I would place empty five gallon buckets with their bottoms cut out where I wanted grape-vines. Then I would backfill around them. When it came time to plant the vines, I would put four inches of screened "soil" in the bottom, position the vine and then fill the bucket the rest of the way with the screened soil. Then I would pull the bucket up leaving the vine and cylinder of slightly better soil.

It broke my heart to see him trimming the roots to stubs because he couldn't make the holes wide enough. Those vines NEED those roots.

I would screen with 3/4" or 1" screen...not very radical, just enough to enrich the soil/stone ratio around the roots. 

Another work-around would be to plant ungrafted rootstock and let them grow a year. Then field graft or bud them the second year. 

Fine Art Tuesday

 

George Catlin was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1796 and died in New Jersey in 1872.

He is notable for painting more than 500 Native-Americans in a time (1830s) and place when beaver pelts and barrels of bear-grease outnumbered canvases and linseed oil (for paint) by 10,000 to 1.

As a frame of reference, Pittsburgh had a population of 13,000 in 1830. Cincinnati had a population of 25,000. St Louis boasted 14,000. St Paul, MN wasn't founded until 1841.

If some of his painting seem to lack some of the fine detail seen in European paintings of the same period, consider that he could not just saunter down to the local art-store and buy another three camel-hair brushes when his wore out.

Ball Players

Tipis

Osceola

A chief of the Plains Ojibwa tribe

Cutting ceremony

A chief going to Washington dressed as a native, coming back as a dandy

Woman of the Wichita tribe

Crow woman, her name translated into English as "Woman who lives in a bear's den"

 Hat-tip to 10x25mm (I think) for suggesting this artist.

Crispy-dry weather and Legacy Infrastructure

 

Dry, crispy weather ahead of us. Look at the separation between the predicted temperatures and the dew-point. Very unlike Michigan.

That is lovely weather to work in as long as I stay hydrated with "electrolytes"...its what plants crave. 

Legacy infrastructure

I have hazy memories of widely spaced walnut trees growing on the hillside that is now the Hill Orchard.

There are still walnut trees growing in the bottom-land at the base of the hill.

The tireless Lucas Machias sent me an article quite some time ago. It was about how the roots of trees in a forest will cross over each other and as they gain girth, they will graft together.

That is a problem when something like Oak Wilt strikes. The disease organism can spread from tree-to-tree-to-tree without the need for a vector.

The positive side is that if the top of a tree dies, the roots continue to live as the neighboring trees continue to trade carbohydrates for water and nutrients. What is totally weird about this is that trees will root-graft to trees of other species!

So that has me wondering, are the walnut roots that are bedeviling the bottom half of the Hill Orchard legacy roots that once belonged to the trees that grew on the hill and have been kept alive via root-grafts with the bottom-land walnut trees? Or are they roots that have always belonged to the trees growing in the bottom-land?

One of the tidbits that stimulated this thought is that the roots we cut when trenching last fall were not where I expected based on the mortality patterns in the Hill Orchard, nor was the diameter of the roots that we cut what I expected. 

If they are vampire roots from the trees that were cut decades ago, then cutting the connection between them and the bottom-land trees means that it is unlikely that the bottom-land trees will make the investment to regrow roots out that far from their stem. If those roots have always belonged to the bottom-land trees and no others, then they will probably grow back.

I am sure there are many other analogies to this issue. Legacy infrastructure can be waste-water and storm drains deeply buried beneath the surface, COBOL or FORTRAN programming or traditional curriculum and "trades" training in social backwaters. Those resources are darned near invisible until they become extinct. And then the cost to replace them is astronomical.

This-and-that

I finally hit my ideal weight. The breakthrough came after I learned that doctors typically deduct 5 pounds for clothing.

I now wear a knit cap, PJ top and bottom and two socks when I step on the scales. Five pieces of clothing at 5 pounds each means that I can deduct 25 pounds from the weight that I read off the scale's display.

My BMI is now exactly 25.

Big day planned

Due to the rain we received, I will stay out of the gardens for a few days to avoid compacting the soil.

I will be going with Shotgun to pick up the barrels in Caledonia this morning. The gentleman selling them had multiple entries on Craigslist but only one of them listed his address and hours. He answered one email but he didn't include hours or his address. I finally stumbled across the one listing that had that information and am going to act on it.

Then I will be working in the orchards. Wind speeds of 3mph predicted and low humidity. No rain forecast for the next ten days. It is the perfect day for spraying herbicide.

I used to shoot for May 1 for spraying herbicide beneath the trees. That is great for controlling grass but some classes of vegetation (like woody vines) leaf-out much later in the spring. So, over time, the orchard floor becomes a jungle in the places where you cannot mow. 

Other tasks include grafting and putting cages around trees to protect them from deer.

Scams and fraud

The general buzz on the streets is that scams and fraud have become more aggressive over the last few months. Various forms of identity theft are the high runner with the EASIEST way to do it being to steal a senior citizen's phone and guess the password (1111, 2222, 1234, 1212 and so on). Then they open their Amazon, Walmart or payment apps and buy a bunch of stuff with gift cards being the item-of-choice.

The most common PINs start with "1", "0" or "2"

 

The least common PINs start with "8", "9", "6" or "7"

The point is to use a unique PIN or password, to treat your phone like it is a wallet with ten, $100 bills in it.

I must confess to being willfully ignorant about payment apps. I watch people pay for things by opening their phone and scanning QR code and that seems risky. Again, I am ignorant, but linking my phone to a bank or a credit account gives me the willies.

Luanda, Angola: Population 8.8 million

 

I am not going to do a lot of editorializing.

Angola is not a rich country.

Based on the walls and bars across every opening, it is not a high-trust society.

Trash is thrown into the street and is helpfully packed into the deepest ruts and potholes.

The torrential rains are more than the streets/drains can accommodate and the very foundations of the city are under-cut by erosion.

The high point of the video is when the videographer walks past a Catholic school at the 3:45 mark.

Catholic teachings on "birth control"

At this time, the mainstream Catholic teaching on artificial (i.e. not abstinence or (in some cases) barrier methods) birth control is that it is the equivalent of homicide because a fertilized egg is denied its right to implant into the endometrium of his or her mother's uterus. It is theologically considered the equivalent of not allowing a baby to nurse from his/her mother's breasts and letting him/her starve to death.

Catholic teachings evolve...but they evolve very slowly.

For instance, it was once taught that rape was a less grievous sin than masturbation. The "logic" was that a potential good (a baby) was possible with rape that was not a possibility with masturbation. That teaching reversed when the the debate expanded to include not just the sinner and potential offspring but to also include the woman (or man) who had been violated.

In the glacial pace of the Eternal Church, similar arguments are evolving where the greater social consequences of exceeding the carrying capacity of the land are being introduced into the debates. Every person who dies by starvation or communicable diseases that are exacerbated by over-crowding is a potential "player" in the calculus of sin-and-salvation.

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.