Pray for the families of the victims of the Texas flooding
Extensive flooding in central Texas around Kerrville and Hunt. 24 confirmed dead. Many remain missing. A disproportionate share of the missing are children. This is a good time to send up some prayers for miracles.
The seed-list for the fall garden:
Beets: Boro. It was a toss-up between Boro and Merlin. I am not a huge fan of beets but Mrs ERJ likes them. Hybrid beet seeds seem to have more seedling vigor than open-pollinated varieties.
Broccoli: Happy Rich, a cut-and-come-again variety. The majority of broccoli varieties are selected for commercial growers who want to harvest a crop and then immediately turn around and plant another crop. Happy Rich cheerfully keeps sending up (small) stems of broccoli.
Cucumber: Max Pak...not technically a fall vegetable but it might be worth putting plastic over to extend the season. Max Pak is a hybrid, pickling cucumber with a broad spectrum of disease resistance.
Chinese Cabbage: Citrus. Large and suitable for kimchi or stir-fry
Radish: Summer Cross #3 Daikon. As close as you can come to a "classic" hybrid Daikon radish.
We had a thunderstorm cell track through Eaton Rapids yesterday afternoon. It dropped about a half inch of rain and there were high winds.
The winds pushed about 20% of my corn over. I will go out later today and straighten them up. That entails holding them vertical while I use a hoe to mound dirt around their base.
This is the time of year when the farmers growing wheat are nervous. Wheat with heavy heads full of grain are vulnerable to being blown over ("Lodging" in the farming trade). A quick tour this morning didn't show me any additional lodging in neighboring fields but I wasn't really looking all that hard.
Mrs ERJ has very firm ideas about me watching the road when I am driving.
Varmints
I had a target near the garden after the rain.
I pulled the appropriate tool from the proper place in the air-conditioned house and proceeded to pussy-foot to a position with an appropriate backstop behind the target. I wasn't hurrying but I wasn't lollygagging.
Raising the tool to align the sights with the target I was dismayed to see that not only had the lens fogged, but there were droplets of water on them. I still "made" the shot but it is a reminder that scopes are wonderful BUT they have weaknesses.
After taking care of the varmint, I put the tool beneath a ceiling fan. If there was condensate on the glass lenses, then there is undoubtedly condensate on the metal.
Armscor, 36 grain hollow-point on left, Federal P# 745 36 grain, copper-plated hollow-point on the right. Guess which profile feeds through magazines with fewer hang-ups? The Armscor is OK unless the magazine is filled to capacity, then the blunt tip dead-heads against the leading edge of the magazine. The more sleekly tapered Federals run through the magazines like grease through a goose.
Rain
The Upper Orchard and the Hill Orchard did not benefit from the T-storm. A tiny bit of rain is predicted for Sunday but not enough to count, so I will be lugging water on Monday or Tuesday.
If he is not a "baby" while he is in your womb, then why do you paste ultrasound images into his baby-book? Why are "your circumstances" the condition that determines whether he is a baby or just a "lump of tissue"?
Three days of dry weather after a rain is the Goldilock's time before tilling, at least with the kinds of soil I am dealing with.
A woodchuck got in and had her way with the green beans and cucumbers and lettuce.
I tilled Southern Belle's garden today. It looks a lot better after running the tiller between the rows and touching up with the hoe.
This apple tree was buried in the hawthorn and honeysuckle. The gentleman who Southern Belle hired to clear out the brush agreed to leave this tree.
I am curious to test the apples after they ripen. Even if they are terrible, I can always graft over it.
And about that pear tree I grafted...
Everything about that tree screamed "PEAR!". The twigs. The tree form. How it suckered. Everything.
So I grafted Concorde and an early pear on to it.
Two months later...something seemed off...so I looked at it more closely. It is an apple tree. The Concorde pear is doing very well on it while the early pear is not thriving. Yes, I make mistakes just like everybody else.
I am not holding my breath. Incompatibility is often delayed. It will probably reject the Concorde grafts, too.
After finishing up at Southern Belle's, I tilled the home garden but I didn't pull weeds or touch-up with the hoe. I will do that tomorrow.
If any of you have suggestions for plants I can "plug in the holes" where several plants died then I am all ears. For example, I have some very spotty rows of field corn. Maybe black oiler sunflowers? I am racing against the clock.
Growing up in Michigan, Faygo commercials were a regular feature of local TV programming. They really pushed Red Pop, maybe because the national producers didn't occupy that niche.
Fridolin Leiber born 1843 in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. He died in 1912.
He specialized in lithographs which was an early form of color printing with limitations regarding detail and colors.
There was a large market for religious and moral images with book-marker sized and post-card sized images being big sellers.
Snobs would likely turn up their noses at his work, scoffing that they were "commercial illustrations, not art", but in modern language, Leiber' work was guided by "crowd-sourced knowledge" and was very well executed within the limitations of the technology.
Whoupi Goldbricker is a clown who knows how to work a crowd. Like P.T. Barnum, she knows the value of creating controversy and getting into the headlines...as long as they spell her name correctly.
Goldbricker recently claimed that Blacks in the United States are even more repressed and economically disadvantaged than even the most disadvantaged person in Iran.
Even if Goldbricker's hypothesis isn't directly testable, we can look at some proxies for rural Iranians and make some comparisons.
This family is in the highlands of Nepal. For the first 45 seconds we watch one of the women picking nettle greens using a hooked knife, a basket and chop-sticks. Why the chop-sticks? Because nettles will sting you before they are cooked. Yes, that is what is for dinner.
The next 10 minutes shows the woman parching corn and then preparing the family meal in a fly-infested hut. She cooks about three gallons of corn-grits, a pan of dried-fish and pot-liqour (stewed greens) and cooks some greens. Each member of the family is given a massive wad of stiff grits with some of the cooked fish and greens ladled over it for flavoring.
The video shows the family tucking into the feast as if it were something special.
The next five minutes shows the family cooking frogs. Not just the legs...entire frogs (although they may have been gutted).
At one level, it is inspiring to see the extreme conditions humans can survive, even thrive under.
At another level, it is sobering to realize that hundreds-of-millions of people living on the edge could be pushed into extinction with the most insignificant of changes in economics; say something as simple as the doubling of the price of vegetable oils.
At a third level, it is beyond obscene for 300 pound, Whoupi Goldbricker to claim that she is more oppressed than people like those depicted in this video. It seems improbable that Goldbricker would be able to climb up the hill to the dwelling once, much less put in a full day's work of physical labor and then be able to prepare a meal using the resources within the dwelling.
As a side-note
I had been wondering about the functionality of the wasp-waisted cooking vessels in that part of the world.
At the 7:50 mark in the video the woman demonstrates the functionality.
And at the 6:09 mark she shows us the utility of the riveted handles on her wok.
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