Prepare to suffer

The middle of August until the end of October is my favorite weather in Michigan. Then comes firearm deer season. Then wood-cutting season.

August offers local sweet corn, peaches, tomatoes, melons, cucumbers. Living is easy.

Exercise update

After soiling-the-bed in terms of not exercising last week, I got back on the horse this morning (shamelessly mixing metaphors).

Seven in the morning, out for a one mile run. This picture was taken on the walk back to the house.

The sun peeking up over the woods

I felt surprisingly strong at the start of the run. I leaned into the discomfort for the last 1/4 mile. A 12:05 mile is slightly better than expected.

After Mass, Mrs ERJ and I went to the gym. She walked. I did an abbreviated lifting session. I only lifted my usual warm-up and one set of six repetitions of my body-weight.

My PT goal wasn't to take up where I left off two Fridays ago but to inform my body that the vacation was over.

Homilies and sermons

I was informed that a "Homily" is a sermon that covers the Bible readings that are presented at the church service. A sermon is an assembly of moral teachings that are not necessarily directly tied to the readings.

I am still getting used to Father Bob, our new priest. Overall, the length of the Mass is a wee-bit shorter than Father Dwight, our previous priest.

Father Bob is Johnny-Onnit through the service. He scoots right along.

His homilies, on the other hand, are complex and multi-layered. They run about 50% longer than Father Dwight's...let's say 15 minutes vs 10 minutes...not that I put a stopwatch on them. He stays on-topic and makes connections between the Old (Jewish) Testament reading, the middle reading which is typically from the Letters and the final reading which is always from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.

He also makes it personal which I think is powerful. The Bible challenges us. If properly read it SHOULD cause us discomfort because we are imperfect. It is very easy and very comfortable to make the messages in the Bible academic or intellectual. It is very easy to apply them to the person sitting three pews behind you. But when Jesus was writing in the dirt when the crowd wanted to stone the woman, it is a pretty good bet that he wasn't writing Newton's Three Laws of Motion.

From a personality standpoint, Father Bob projects as a little edgier and more-driven than Father Dwight. That is likely to seem "ordinary" after a few months. He also gravitates to families with young children. He radiates joy when he sees them and makes a point of personally greeting them. I think he knows how hard it is to get everybody presentable and get the to church before the starting bell. A preacher who is thrilled to have children in church, even if they make noise during a long homily, is a very good thing.

The scuttlebutt is that our congregation is "friendly". Some other congregations are rife with stress and conflict. I suspect that the bishop uses our congregation (actually, two congregations because we have two locations) as a Rest-and-Recovery assignment for priests who left it all on the field and need a breather to recover. Sort of like tag-team-wrestling.

Discomfort

I have a friend who shares some of my alarm regarding current trends. He talked to his priest and asked for "wise counsel". The priest responded "Prepare to suffer".

My friend, if he trusts you, will occasionally use that phrase. It is not a threat. It is a reminder that God engineered into us not only the ability to endure "suffering" or "discomfort", but to actually NEED suffering, just like an internal combustion engine needs heat to vaporize the fuel and cook the water out of the lubricating oil.

Eight minute run-time.

The presenter is an Emergency Room doctor and former military.

Context and perspective are recommended. I scoff at the newbies who are a 1/2 mile from the trail-head and clutching two, one-liter water bottles and starting to panic. They are in a county park on well marked trails and the temperature is in the upper-60F range. Obviously, they can lean a little more into "discomfort" with very little risk.

On the other hand, there are people who do genuinely stupid things like going on walk-abouts when the wind-chill is -40 or who fire-up the chainsaw in +90F heat after a hurricane without a plan to rehydrate, on-board calories and avoid the mid-day sun.

What is foreign to me and thus difficult to write about, are the seemingly vast number of people who are totally freaked out by normal physiological responses like perspiration. Sixty years of marketing imbued people with a horror of sweating. They panic. They would almost prefer a case of fulminating gangrene to the sheen of extreme perspiration.

That revulsion of perspiration spills over to all other forms of discomfort. Great, thundering herds of people are resistant to meeting new people because "it makes me uncomfortable". They don't try new things. They eat the same foods at the same times and eat in ample amounts. They sedate themselves with drugs and digital distractions. 

If your Youtube feeds are like mine, they are saturated with ads for on-line gambling. I suspect that they get plenty of "takers". Anything to avoid personal responsibility. Anything to avoid "stress".

"Prepare to suffer" is not an ominous threat. It is wise advice, like "A hurricane is coming. Fill the tanks of your vehicles, sharpen your chainsaw and bake a peanut butter sheet cake before it hits."

More sweat now means less (of your) blood on the ground later. It isn't just "Prepare to suffer", it is "Prepare by suffering".

New wine, new wineskins

National Socialist German Workers' Party

The warm embrace of Communism by Gen Z is entirely baffling to those of us in the Boomer Generation. "How can they be so naive?" we ask.

Some of that is because as Boomers we saw movies like The Killing Fields and Sophie's Choice. We saw reenactments of recent events; 1975 for The Killing Fields and 1941(ish) for Sophie's Choice. People were murdered because they wore eye-glasses or because their hands were soft. We saw mothers having to choose which children might live and which were sent to concentration camps.

We have no illusions about what happens when totalitarians consolidate their control over the government. They murder on an industrial scale. They eliminate everybody who is invested in the old regime, much like a male lion kills every male lion in the pride when he takes over. Only his genes will survive.

Even Jesus observed "No one patches an old cloak with a piece of unshrunken cloth, for its fullness pulls away from the cloak and the tear gets worse.

People do not put new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise the skins burst, the wine spills out, and the skins are ruined. Rather, they pour new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved.”  -Matt 9:16,17 NAB

 

The Gen Z point to Scandinavian Socialism and claim "It will be like that!"

 

My beef with that argument is that the Scandinavian countries had very strong, national identity and pride as they implemented socialism. Gen Z has been taught to hate the United States and to repudiate our history. They are fully primed to liquidate ties to the past. Many people under 40 are very angry and very envious of "rich people" who are statistically quite likely to also be "old people".

 

The twist in Sophie's Choice is that her family were ardent supporters of the new regime but were liquidated nonetheless. They were perceived as a threat and as "compromised" and were destroyed. They were "snowflakes" and it was incomprehensible to them that they would be killed with no more thought than a camper slapping a mosquito. 

 

It is very unfortunate that a movie like TKF or SC has not been made in the life-time of Gen Z and the Millennials.

Grab-bag

The spinach cultivar trial is not going well. The tiny seedlings are being trampled by ducks. Maybe some will make it. Maybe not. The stand will be so sketchy that any conclusions will be garbage.

On the positive side, I trapped a woodchuck INSIDE of the fenced-in area last night. 

Rain

Digging potatoes is postponed until late Wednesday. It takes three, full days for my dirt to dry out enough to be workable. Trying to rush things is like picking at a zit, it only makes things worse.

Growth of new fruit trees in the Upper Orchard

This spring I planted 12 fruit trees in the Hill and Upper Orchard. If you had asked me before I pulled out the tape measure and took data, I would have told you that most of them were woefully short of the 24" growth target.

I adjust my fertilizer applications so that I get more than 24" of shoot extension* while I am growing-the-tree to fill its place in the canopy. After mostly fills its space, I reduce the Nitrogen to get 12"-to-8" of shoot extension because I want it to grow mostly fruit and not as much wood. 

The poultry-netting was added after the deer figured out how to reach through the welded wire mesh.

Of the eight trees planted in the Upper Orchard, all but one of them will hit the 24" of growth target. The one that will not only shows 12" of growth. It was molested by deer that reached through the 2"-by-4" welded wire mesh cage around it.

This was an over-achieving apple tree. I have the tape locked at 24" and I hook the end on the wire-mesh cage where last year's growth ended. There are multiple shoots that are 24" and one that is probably 29".

The soil in the Upper Orchard continues to impress me. If I only looked at the trees in the Upper Orchard I would be insufferably smug. If I only looked at the results in the Hill Orchard, which is right next to the Upper Orchard, I would look like a total boob.

Of the trees planted in the Hill Orchard, only the Cresthaven peach will hit the 24" target. The three apple trees struggled with poor soil and deer pressure. 

The 2026 growing season is not over. Most of the trees will put on a few more inches before they set their terminal bud.

Salmon patties

Kubota has a friend who likes to fish for salmon on Lake Michigan. The friend gave Kubota about three pounds of frozen salmon fillets.

Kubota, like many young men, isn't very interested in cooking. He, in turn, re-gifted the fillets to us.

I cooked one of the bags of fillets and saved out the nicest looking one. I turned the others into salmon patties.

Roger Miller, one of my mentors, used to really push his young trees. I recall seeing him get 8' of growth on more than one sweet cherry tree in its first year. He used heavy mulch to ensure good soil moisture and liberal application of nitrogen. His soil was relatively heavy-clay and was not subject to drought.

Is there an upper limit to the "calorie burn" that humans are capable of?

World-class, men, distance swimmers are likely to be the most aerobic athletes over-all. Being heat-limited is not usually an issue. Being a little bit tubby is not necessarily a bad thing.

Conditioning for competition usually involves changing duration and intensity of the work-out. At peak intensity, a male, world-class distance swimmer needs 10,000 Calories a day to not lose weight. During days when they are doing "recovery" and are not in the most grueling exercises, they need 4000 Calories a day.

Now, shift your attention over to the Emergency Survival Energy Bars section of Amazon or Walmart. They would have you believe that you will do just fine on 1200 Calories per day. That might be so for a few days but will not cut-it if you need to be physically active.

One "tell" on the ESE bars is that they have almost no sodium (salt) in them. They will not sustain you if you work hard enough to sweat.

I think that most people whose prepping is centered on manipulating spread-sheets woefully underestimate the number of calories it takes to be physically active for most of the daylight hours.

Side note: A Calorie is one-thousand calories. Food values are typically denominated in Calories to eliminate a bunch of zeros. 

For future reference

 

Posted for future reference. Stolen from Wirecutter.

I got an email from a friend who is retired. He said he was on vacation.

How do you get a vacation from being retired? It relentless. Monday: Retired. Tuesday: Retired. Wednesday: Retired. Thursday: Retired. Friday: Retired. Saturday: Retired. Sunday: Retired.

Rain

I took pictures of the drainage around the house to identify those areas that need fill. Most of this stream was hitting the ground 5' away from the foundation. No problem!

According to the Raindrop app, I received 1.4" 2.2" of rain in the last 24 hours with most of it in the last hour. It is still coming down but most of the thunder is now east of my location.

Four miles south of me has only gotten a trace. 

Van-life

One of my younger acquaintances is fantasizing about van-life. He looks  at his rent and starts jonesing to be a gypsy.

The smart money would be to rent a moving van for a week. That would cost about $150. Take one day to dress-up the interior. Take it to some concert or "event" or campground that interests you. Stay for five days. Clean it out and return it on the seventh day.

According to the second link in the paragraph just above this one, the top locations for parking a van overnight (with you inside of it) are:

Walmart: Most Walmarts allow vampers. Call the customer service desk. Ask if you can. Then ask where they want you to park.

Cracker Barrel:

Cabela's, Bass Pro Shop:

Planet Fitness and clones: Showers with fluffy towels!!! Need to be a member but it is dirt-cheap for what you get.

Truck Stops: Showers and food and gadgets!!!  

General rules: Call ahead. Park in the designated area. Arrive late, i.e. after 7:00 PM. Buy something in the store to make you a legitimate customer, even if it is just a bag of ice. Leave early, i.e. before 7:00 AM. Do not exceed two nights in-a-row in a given place. 

Walmart and other companies allow short-term "campers" because their business model caters to outdoorsy people who travel. Key point, "business". You have to represent incremental business and not scare away any regular business. You are going to have to buy food and other supplies somewhere, right? Make sure that your host gets first crack at those dollars.

No loud music, strobe-lights or anything that attracts attention. No peeing in the bushes. No fires. Look presentable (fully dressed) when outside of your van. No visible drinking or weed use. You are supposed to present the look-and-feel of Johnny Tickseed driving from Janesville, WI to a Bluegrass Festival in Baneberry, TN not some "scary" homeless vagrant.

An adventure in cutting weeds in the garden

I recall writing that cutting the tops of weeds has benefits in terms of preventing weed seeds from ripening to the point where they are viable, even if it was too late to help the crop's yield. I decided to take my own advice.

As I was cutting the weeds, I realized that it will make it faster to dig potatoes if I didn't have to keep pulling weeds to find the hilled potatoes. That will be much appreciated.  

Equipment set: 2000W Wen generator, 100' of extension cord and a 20" Black and Decker, corded hedge trimmer

The generator started up on the first pull. It took a few minutes to loosen up the blade on the hedge trimmer so that they moved freely.
 

"In the beginning, there was chaos." If you are going to steal lines, then steal from the best! If you look carefully, you will see a wheelbarrow on the extreme left-background of the image. And a shovel handle and at T-post. Tobacco plants on right side off frame.

Approximately 100' in-and-out of the frame and 20 feet left-to-right.

30 minutes, same angle as original

After 30 minutes from a slightly different angle. The tall plant is a tomato vine that I plugged into a gap where the potato plants did not come up.

After 59 minutes Time-on-task. I took two breaks but stopped the clock while taking them.

I got faster as I got more experience in handling the hedge trimmer. It breezed through the Giant Foxtail grass and choked on the thicker stems of the Smartweed and Pokeweed. I had to cut those 12" above the ground rather than the 6", give or take a bit, above the ground that I cut the grasses.

At today's prices, a corded, Black and Decker 22" hedge-trimmer costs about $60 on Amazon. 2000W generators run about $300 so that might be a deal-breaker if you don't already have a generator.

Another deal-breaker might be if you cannot lean over and sweep the blade parallel to the ground. That will be hard for some people. 

Potato response to additional nitrogen + grab-bag from the news

Potatoes and fertilizer

Michael, the sometimes anonymous, asked some questions about potatoes and nitrogen rates 

Most crops will show linear, positive responses when a "bottleneck" nutrient is supplemented in moderate amounts. As the supplementation is increased, there comes point when other variables bottle-necking production more than the nutrient of interest. While the crop might still show a positive response, the increment of gain decreases as incremental amounts of the (formerly bottle-necking) nutrient increase.

Traditionally, growers would stop increasing the amount of added nutrient at the point where the income of the incremental production equaled the cost of the incremental nutrient input.

More recently, external costs like nutrient leaching into surface and ground-water have been considered and nutrient use efficiency (how much ends up in the plant) has been added into the equation. From a macro-scale, if you are approaching saturation and your neighbor is far short of it, society is best served if your neighbor applies the nutrient because he will get a higher incremental return on the investment. That is, more food will be produced in-aggregate, if all producers stop adding the nutrient when it hits the same incremental gain/incremental amount applied.

"Sensitivity" is a useful concept for the small grower. That is the incremental production that can be expected per unit-of-added nutrient. The underlying assumptions are important to understand. There is no point in adding more nitrogen, for instance, if your primary bottleneck is lack of moisture in the soil or lack of sunlight.

In Michigan, potatoes/urea can be expected to have a sensitivity of 150:1. That is, if nitrogen is the bottleneck nutrient then each unit of urea added to the potato-patch can be expected to produce an incremental 150 units of potatoes. As long as the total amount of nitrogen available to the potato plants doesn't approach the levels where it exceeds what the plant can absorb and use, that  number is insensitive to the area the urea is spread over and fairly insensitive to whether you planted the potato plants 6" apart in the rows or 18" apart in the rows. I expect this information to be applicable to regions in the United States north of Interstate 70.

"Saturation" depicted by the yellow region where incremental response is functionally almost zero

Actual numbers. Picture a row of potatoes that is 33 feet long (roughly 10 meters) with the rows 40" apart (about one meter). If the soil was totally devoid of nitrogen then one pound of urea, if applied at appropriate times, will be nibbling at the lower end of the saturation level...in Michigan using vigorous, mid or late-season varieties.

That same row of potatoes planted in good garden soil might only get half as much nitrogen as they can use. In that case, adding up to half-a-pound of urea per 33 feet of row will still provide the magical, linear, incremental-response of 150 pounds of potatoes for every pound of urea added.

If you live where metric is king, one kg of urea for every 20 meters of row for horrible dirt and 1/2 kg of urea for every 20 meters will still give you the 150:1 response.

This table shows the yield that commercial potato growers in Michigan can expect from various application rates for nitrogen. 10,000 additional pounds of potatoes for each additional 30 pounds of N. This table and the next table are from MSU E-2779.

If you think in terms of square-feet, 1000 square-feet of potato patch on decent garden soil can probably absorb 5 pounds of urea (an incremental rate of 100 additional pounds of N per acre) with a net increase in yield of about 750 pounds of potatoes/1000 square-feet.

Caveat: Some of the potatoes will be small, some will be lumpy, some might have deep eyes, some are likely to have "hollow heart". The incremental 750 pounds of potatoes will be edible but they will not all be pretty. You still need to control insects and weeds and provide water when necessary.

Applying N several times through the season reduces losses due to leaching (sand). Remember, you have to add it BEFORE the plant needs it. It takes time to percolate to the root-zone and be absorbed by the plant.

To answer the question Michael asked, I think the unfertilized soil was only supplying 1/3 of the N the plants could use. If I had fertilized at optimum rate (another 7 lb urea per 1000 square-feet for that patch of garden) I would be harvesting 3X the pounds of potatoes with no additional tilling, seed potato planted, weeding or number of shovel-fulls of dirt to dig them. That is a very attractive pay-back rate.

Grab bag

A sample of various countries showing the percentage of their Consumer Price Index that is Energy (X axis) and Food (Y axis)

 

NYT downplayed their actions calling it "an honest mistake". They did not publish a retraction until after Spears filed a lawsuit. Sounds like they DNGAS about accuracy until it looked like it might cost them money.

The reporter had integrity. He left the "News" organization when it refused to present both sides of a volatile issue. Seattle.

I might not be a lawyer, but that looks like "inciting violence" to me. Antifa claims to be totally decentralized but that does not pass the smell test.

Pictures

We got our money's worth out of Quicksilver today. A busy girl is a happy girl.

She participated in picking up potatoes. Yes, I have weeds. I am not proud of it but it is reality.

It was not slave-labor. She was paid with potatoes and a zinnia. She got to take a bucket of them home.

She also spread cut sweet peppers in a single layer on a pizza pan for freezing. After an hour in the freezer they are moved to zip-lock bags. Quicksilver spread the peppers three times. She was paid with two bags of frozen peppers.

She was also given an edible bracelet of the reddest red.

This double-pepper was modeled as a mustache but Quicksilver decided that Groucho Marx mustaches were not her vibe.

Eggplant that was excess to current needs were roasted in the toaster oven outside and then canned in garlic/Italian herb vinegar and oil. Waste not, want not.