Medical procedures, orchards and mulberries and a few pictures

The big news this week is that one of the people within our circle is undergoing surgery. While not a minor surgery, it isn't open heart or removing tumors either. It will, however, impair their mobility by a bunch.

Mrs ERJ elected to fly unto their aid with lasagna and plans to "sit" with them for a few days.

I will keep the home-fires burning and keep busy.

Very likely Mrs ERJ and I will pray a Rosary tonight with the intention of a great outcome for the surgical procedure. 

Dacha orchards

I have been thinking about home orchards and more specifically "dacha orchards".

The orchard at Southern Belle's house is an example. As the home-owner, she got to select where it was planted. They wanted to keep the yard the way it was and that pushed the orchard to a spot that is 200 feet from the house. In my opinion, it would be more valuable if it were closer to the house. 

At this point, her orchard has 11 fruit trees and five hazelnut bushes. 

Two of the apple trees are Liberty which is a mid-season (mid-September in southern Michigan) apple. The other five varieties ripen later in the season (Galarina, Melrose, Fuji, Gold Rush, Winecrisp). She has two peach trees with peaches likely to ripen two weeks apart. She has one mulberry tree and one pear tree.

A handy maturity chart. Dates will change year-to-year and in different places.. Order is very likely to stay the same. 

All trees are planted on approximately 12'-by-20' spacing.

Looking at this as a starting point for a pre-planted orchard:

I would probably replace the peaches with something else because peaches are typically short-lived trees. One of the substitutes might be a European plum variety like President or Bluebyrd (for canning) that is resistant to black-knot. Ideally, it would have a second variety grafted into it for pollination. Pozacaga and Kenmore are both self-pollinating but are both vulnerable to black-knot. I would probably replace the other peach tree with another pear tree...probably a very-early ripening one.

I would definitely keep the mulberry. It provides fruit from mid-June into August. Another advantage of mulberries is that you can harvest them by spreading a tarp and shaking branches and you can make pies using the entire berry, seeds, stem and all. Very labor efficient. 

Some mulberry pictures

A reminder of how tiny some of the unselected, wild mulberries are locally

A picture of some Silk Hope mulberries courtesy of Lucky Pittman.

If you tip your screen a little bit, you might get a little more color-contrast. This photo shows a mulberry scion and shows how large the pith is. Some of these sticks could pass for soda-straws. Fortunately, the wood cuts easily and does not shatter.

Yesterday's work-tickets

The feed-lot panels are up and I tied the tomato vines to them

 I grafted four mulberries as I continue to empty out the fridge.

Before weeding: a row of pole beans

After weeding

A tour of the property

We have Northern Orioles nesting near-by. They are hitting the bird-bath and working over the Serviceberry bushes.

 

We have garter/ribbon snakes by the gross-lot. Milk snakes are much less common. I think milk snakes are exceptionally handsome.

The snail populations in the areas where I have been spraying sodium carbonate solution and placed borax-laced baits had almost no active snails yesterday morning. Maybe they went to church! Alas, one sunny day does not make it summer. It could be a fluke. I will continue to monitor.

The small holes in these dock leaves are probably snail damage

In an earlier post I speculated that the leaves of dock (Rumex) might not support snails due to their high oxalate content. Looking at various dock plants, I see that snails DO feed on them but they don't appear to be a preferred food.

As a note for the future, slugs and snails are most active in the early morning. Both pests dislike sunlight and dryness. If you have ducks for snail control, letting them out of their nighttime safe-space shortly after sun-rise makes for well-fed and happy ducks. Also, if you have the flexibility time-wise...don't feed them until 9:00 a.m. Hungry ducks are the best hunters.

Raspberries

 

I random thought that will blow away if I don't write it down

It occurred to me as I was grafting the Howard walnuts that it would be a darned shame if somebody bulldozed the trees to build a house.

I know that it is impossible to control the distant future. Heck, I struggle to make my plans for tomorrow happen.

As I was grafting, I remembered that many of the houses...dacha...were VERY close to the road by Midwestern standards. Perhaps there might be something of value in looking at overhead images from various parts of Ukraine and seeing if there was anything useful to be learned.

Western Ukraine, near Slovakia. Houses fronting the street.

 

Northwestern Ukraine, near Poland. Very large dacha (rich people). Front of house 50 from the center of the road.

Northeastern Ukraine, slightly east of the Belarus/Russia junction. 70 feet.

So, if a fellow were inclined to plant random fruit and nut orchards, he would be pretty safe if he were to plant the closest trees 100 feet from the road. Furthermore, if he deduced where the grade favored the entrance, he can confidently predict where the house will be built.

Back engineering WHY the houses are so close to the road. It snows in Eastern Europe. Shoveling snow sucks. There is a labor shortage in Eastern Europe. They are poor by US standards with 10% of the GDP/capita. They don't just order a snow-blower from Amazon (and blowing snow sucks, too). They don't call the concrete company and order 25 yards of concrete to pour a driveway.

Also, the space between your house and the road is vulnerable to petty theft. Closing up the distance and keeping the tools and gardens behind the house reduces the visibility and the theft.

Orchards

It takes orchards time to become productive. God forbid that we should collapse like Eastern Europe but imagine the good fortune you would feel if the plot for your dacha (lifeboat) already had a dozen fruit trees and a handful of nut trees that were already producing. 

Bonus image

A composite diagram of what a typical dacha compound looks like. Source

 

A short parable for Sunday morning

Thebes found himself standing in the line that snaked upward toward the Pearly Gates. No surprise, really. He had been old. The cause was not what he expected but how you die isn't something people have a choice about.

He hadn't been a particularly pious man. He had been a man of duty and been busy. He couldn't read but even if he could there were no scrolls in the small village he lived in. Regardless, he dutifully listened to the occasional itinerant preachers who percolated through the small, rocky valleys that made up Thebes' world. He implemented what he could understand and marveled at what seemed inconceivable.

When it was his turn to be judged, a fisherman stood at the gate and the radiant ones were arrayed behind him. It was calming to know that he was to be weighed by another laborer.

The fisherman's gnarled hands swiftly counted the knots on the recording strings. His fingers shuffled the abacus. Then he paused and then repeated the counting and calculating.

Turning to the radiant figures behind him, he said "The one named Thebes is exactly equal. How do you want me to handle it?" The brilliance of the figures obscured the details. They reminded Thebes of the snow-covered sentinel pine on the ridge above the valley, first lit by the rising sun.

The voice from the brilliant figure on Thebes' left was as sweet and soothing as warmed honey. "Ask him what he wants."

Thebes was surprised, not by the fisherman's words but by what the figure had said. He was just a man. Not "holy". Not "bad". Just a man. He had not expected to be offered a choice.

"I am nothing but a common laborer. If it should please you, Lord, I should take that bucket of water, the stool and a towel and wash the feet those coming to see you" Thebes suggested. "I will set up at the edge of the light where I won't bother anybody."

The Lord asked "Will you only wash the feet of the just?"

Thebes replied "It is not within my power to know who was just or unjust. I shall wash the feet of everybody in the line."

The Lord said "So be it".

Thebes first picked up the bucket and then put it down. He could not carry all three. He solved the problem by tying the towel around his waist before picking up the other two items and trudging back down the line.

He set them down where the light of the Lord was but a kiss on the horizon and their voices were but faint murmurs. The line had grown since he had first joined it.

The worst seat in heaven is infinitely better than the best seat in hell. 

Thebes died many, many centuries ago. If you don't see him on your path to the Pearly Gates, then the position is probably open again. Something to keep in mind if the counting string with your name on it has a lot of knots on it.

Self-talk

Imagine it is the middle of the winter. There is no food in your house. As the bread-winner, the guy who "brings home the bacon", how far would you walk, how many hours would you invest to feed your beloved and your children for one more day?

Would you say "Screw it. If it isn't on the porch they can cry themselves to sleep?" There are some people like that.

Would you say "I will walk to the end of the driveway, but that is the limit of how much effort that I will invest in keeping my wife happy and my children fed."?

Or would you say "I would walk a mile (20 minutes) to get food"? I know that almost everybody would be willing to invest 20 minute from picking up the keys, driving, waiting in the drive-through and returning if that is what it takes to feed your family for one meal.

If you had no other choice, would you be willing to walk three miles one way (an hour) and back (another hour) if it meant you could bring back enough food to feed your entire family for a day. Sadly, I think that some "men" would fail at this, but most would step-up.

Weeding the garden

Before: Weeded row on the right. Unweeded in the center. Somebody has been falling down on his job.

 

After weeding. Dramatic photos are usually evidence of operator failure. The weeds should never have gotten that out-of-control.

For the sake of argument, let's say that I can hand-weed* two-feet of row a minute. That means I can weed 40' in 20 minutes, 120' in an hour or 240' in two hours...the time it takes to make a round-trip three miles away-and-back on foot.

240' of row will grow a lot of potatoes or rutabagas or tomatoes or sweet corn.

Yes, I know, there was time invested in many other activities to make that 240 feet of row happen. But if you don't stay on top of the weeds you might as well have not planted the seeds.

What weeding is not

Weeding a garden seems so pedestrian and simple that it is baffling that it can be so valuable.

But weeding isn't subject to income tax of FICA taxes. It isn't something where you have to "cover" for the sick, the lame or the lazy who expect a pay-check but don't work.

Weeding doesn't require $6 million in tools (the cost of a single robotic work-cell circa 1996).

Weeding does not require $500 wingtip shoes or a $3000 laptop with killer graphics cards. 

You don't have to take out a student loan to know how to pull weeds.

What weeding requires is that you show up and do it when it is time to do it.

Time-blindness

I think people who have ADHD lack the cognitive horse-power to envision scenarios where they might have to walk some distance and bring back food. 

They also lack the background.

Those of us of a certain age might remember reading The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder (no known relation to John Wilder) and how her future-husband, Almanzo, ventured forth in the blizzards to drag back two-tons of pounds of wheat on a sled to feed the village of De Smet, South Dakota.

That was back when men were men.

Pulling weeds when there is a pleasant breeze and the air temperature is tickling the upper 70s (F) is trivial compared to striking off across the trackless prairie in the middle of the winter looking for food. A veritable walk-in-the-park.

Self-talk

Thoughts like those are what loop through my mind as I pull weeds.

Bonus photo

Whole wheat tortilla, jasmine rice, Happy Rich broccoli from the garden, kielbasa. Eaten after a trip through the microwave and rolled into a burrito.

*Hand-weed: On hands-and-knees, identifying  the plants that should stay and pulling everything else using one's hands.

A shout-out to line-men and the Free-Market

I want to shout-out to capitalism.

While driving to my destination to graft, in one fifteen mile of state-highway I saw 9 (nine) utility trucks with cherry-pickers in convoys of two and three heading south. I saw one flat-bed with racks with approximately 20 utility poles going south.

The men in those trucks were not leaving their homes out of a sense of altruism. They are driving to the aid of hard-hit areas because "the market" determined what price would convince men to do so. And then, "the market" made that offer.

If you are watching a freezer full of meat starting to thaw, or if you have a family member who is starting to choke because the AC isn't running and the air is filling with allergens. Then you don't begrudge those men a penny of what they are paid.

If your basement is flooding because your sump-pump has no power or if the local gas station cannot dispense gas because there is no power to run the pumps you are overjoyed to see those guys show up.

Oddly, the only people who resent linemen are unattractive people who write poetry nobody will ever read and create art that nobody will ever look at. They are envious of people who can actually perform work that is in such high demand that they would willingly pay it out of their own pocket. 

---End of pep talk--- 

Burning out the bank

My news de-tox ends tomorrow. Many thanks to all of the meme warriors who kept me appraised of the state of the universe.

State-of-the-fleet

One of my children had his car crap-out last week. It dropped into limp-home mode during rush hour. The next day, when he tried to start it, the engine would not stay running. He had to call a wrecker to get it to the mechanic on Thursday. Not a good sign.

He was biking to work on the day it did not rain. The other four days a week he rode the bus.

I offered him the loan of my truck. He accepted.

The irony is that this particular kid is my most fastidious, persnickety, details-matter kid. My truck is not the kind of ride that immediately springs to mind when you here the words "Urban Cool". It is more the kind of truck guaranteed to get you a job the instant you turn into the driveway of a business that does landscaping. 

But it starts and runs and doesn't leak when it rains. It gets 17 miles to the gallon and you can leave the doors unlocked and nobody will steal the granola bars in the center console.

And that left me without transportation. 

I had been catching up on odd-jobs around the house since my wings got clipped.

Yesterday morning Mrs ERJ asked if I wanted to drive Vinnie Van Go* to The Property to do some work out there.

YOU BET!

Yesterday, all I did was graft. I am trying to empty out the refrigerator. In budgeting terms I was trying to "burn out the bank).

I grafted

The mulberries were ripening on the first tree I grafted. They are very, very small. And they are insipid. Any named variety will be a big step up.

 

I put two grafts on that tree. You can see the top of my six-foot tall ladder at the bottom of the frame. The deer will need stilts to get to these grafts but they are still vulnerable to woodchucks climbing and browsing. 

3 Mulberry trees (more than 3" diameter trunks) to Silk Hope mulberry. They are located on the west boundary of the Upper Orchard at roughly 80' intervals.

Grand Traverse on the north tree and The Beast on the south tree. The two hazelnut bushes are monsters!

 4 grafts on two mature hazelnuts, 2 Grand Traverse and 2 The Beast (undoubtedly named after the famous blogger who goes by TB). West boundary of the Upper Orchard. The hazel are side-by-side with 20' spacing.

2 Schlarbaum chestnuts in the Hill Orchard.

1 apple in the Upper Orchard. I was looking for a place to park "a copy" of the late apple we found on Southern Belle's property.

One of the things that slowed me down, besides the ladder work, was having to carve away branches so the new growth will have ample sunlight.

Same as above but zoomed in to make the graft visible

Black walnuts to Howard Persian Walnut. Burnt Ridge sells Howard walnuts and claims that they are capable of surviving Zone 6. I have to admit that seems improbable, but what do I know? I consider it the gardening equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.

As you can tell by the photographs, I am a big fan of marking my grafts with surveyor's tape. I also like grafting after a substantial rain. Every grafter looks like a gifted craftsman when the rootstock is growing like crazy.

In all, 17 grafts and three hours time-on-task. While that seems slow to me, grafting on larger, established trees takes longer (pruning, dragging ladders) but gives you quite a jump on filling the allotted space for the plant. There are a lot of roots "pushing" the new graft. Six feet of new growth on a mulberry graft is within the realm of the possible.

*Not to be confused with Vinnie van Goth (wrong color) or Vinnie (Johann Wolfgang) von Goethe.

The war on snails continues

More experimenting on snail control.

This paper states

Boric acid (BOA) is currently used as a safe alternative molluscicide to control land snails in sustainable agriculture, but the mechanisms of toxicity have not yet been investigated.

(Boric acid) was found to be lethal against T. pisana with LC₅₀ values of 24.7 and 8.05 mg g⁻¹ (2.5% and 0.8% respectively) after 3 and 7 days of exposure, respectively. BOA sublethal concentrations led to a significant reduction in food consumption and growth of snails after 14 days of exposure...lipid peroxidation level and catalase activity were elevated, whereas acetylcholinesterase activity was inhibited in the treated snails.

Note: Many insecticides are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors. Essentially, it prevents nerve impulses from stopping...muscles lock-up. 

I whipped up a batch of approximately 2.5% bait and... 

They were attracted to the bait but didn't want to eat it.

I am pretty sure my problem is that I didn't use boric acid but substituted the equivalent amount of borax. Borax is a sodium salt of boric acid (commercially available and dirt-cheap). However, it has a pH of about 9 it it appears that snails are sensitive to pH.

Image of the same bait-can on the second morning. It looks like more snails to me.

Another attempt using actual boric acid powder will be attempted in the near future.

Well, alrighty!

Ammonia has a pH of 11(ish) which is 100X more alkaline than borax. Ammonia is expensive and perishable.

Sodium carbonate is cheap (ten cents an ounce) and shelf-stable. A little bit of guessing suggests that a 3% solution of sodium carbonate will have a pH of about 11.8*. So I speedy-quick mixed up 120g of sodium carbonate into 3800ml of water and found some volunteers to test it on.

Solutions with high pH are caustic. Proteins are chains of amino acids that are knit together into tissue. Exposure to high pH solutions shreds those amino-acid chains and dissolves the cell walls of animals like slugs and snails. The reaction is self-limiting. The amino acids that are released lower the pH toward neutral and the reaction fizzles.

Spray that lands on the ground is quickly buffered (neutralized) by the clay-content. Spray that lands on dead grass encounters very little buffering and the dead grass becomes a no-go zone for them until the sodium carbonate is leached out by the rains. 

They did not like the spray. They started falling to the ground about five seconds after getting sprayed.

***Follow-up: I have no evidence that this actually killed the snails. It may have maimed them...but not enough dead-bodies to make any claims. I did a re-spray this morning with a followup a minute later. Many of the snails turn-turtle at the first spray and expose their foot which is a much larger target. 

*Lye and lime have a pH of 14 which is about 200 times more alkaline than sodium carbonate solution