Busy like squirrels

 

Squash on shelves

Squash in oven. Both of these squash had a soft-spot on them that made the non-starters for storage.

Containers of potatoes getting tucked away in various places.

We have been appreciating 7 gallon, fabric nursery bags for storing vegetables in the root cellar. They are very inexpensive, collapse down to a very small size for the off-season, breath, don't create "pressure sores" on the rinds of vegetables. They have two handles that are easy on the hands.  There is a lot to like about them.

Fine Art Tuesday

 

Jacobus Hendrik Pirneef was born in 1886 in Pretoria, South African Republic. He died in 1957.

His work does not ape the traditions of the old, Euro-centric masters. He uses different scales, a different color palate and leans toward vast, sweeping vistas of alien (to us) landscapes.

 

Hat-tip to Lucas Machias who scours the internet and provides this blog with content.
 

Duck dormitory, walnut orchards and taking a child to the dentist

The Duck Dormitory

 

The glass in the rear lift-gate of the (free) truck cap had been broken. I framed the opening with 1" x 1-1/2" strips ripped from a two-by-four. Then I used 1/4" crown staples to attach galvanized poultry-netting across the opening. I plan to stretch clear, poly-film across it when the weather turns cold. 

Persian walnuts

Ukraine is the world's 4th largest exporter of "English" or "Persian" walnuts.

Producers get four-times as much, per unit weight, for cracked nuts as for nuts that are in-shell. By "cracked-nuts" I mean nut meats that have been removed from the shell. Since most Persian Walnuts run about 50% nut-meat by weight, that has the potential to double the revenue per tree.

Producers get a much higher premium for nut-halves, something like an additional 5X over the price received for nut-meat pieces.

The major bottleneck for the producers is lack of manpower. The men either migrated to Western Europe to avoid being conscripted, are conscripted or are dead. There is a stunning lack of "labor" in Ukraine.

From the perspective of the buyers, there are many quality issues with nuts purchased from hundreds of discrete suppliers. Some sell moldy or off-flavored nuts. Those are impossible to sort-out when sold as uncracked nuts. Some mix in a percentage of off-flavored (rancid, discolored, moldy) pieces to pad the weight of good nuts.

That results in the buyer absorbing all of the risk and he discounts the prices he offers for nuts that are still in-the-shell. 

Another factor is that most nuts sold in Ukraine come from seedling trees. Some walnut trees produce nuts that are well sealed at the suture between the nut halves and the nut-meats retain quality even when subjected to challenging environments. Other trees are the opposite. Their nuts are not well sealed and absorb water and quickly lose quality.

The universities in Ukraine, in spite of being battered by the tumult and vicissitudes of war, are promoting grafted trees of proven selections and seedlings from elite selections. The elite trees don't take up any more area or demand any more fertilizer than the trees that produce fewer or inferior-quality nuts. Planting them is like finding free-money.

Young walnut tress in the background.

It gives me hope when I realize that people were planting nut trees 70 miles from the war's front-lines, even as the war raged on.

And so, I was quite interested when one of the "Dacha" videos showed the fifteen year-old granddaughter tooling by a newly planted walnut orchard. Due to editing, the sequence is split but the first bit shows her driving by four year-old trees and the second bit shows her driving by 8 year-old trees. Guessing the age of trees is a hit-or-miss endeavor. They might be younger if heavily fertilized. They might be older if planted on blow-sand not taken care of.

Today's big adventure

I get to squire Quicksilver to the dentist at zero-dark-thirty. 

***Follow-up: A big shout-out to Pediatric Dentistry of East Lansing. Dental Tech Miss Emily (the Emily with the hair the color of a new, copper penny) was totally awesome. Dentist Jenn was also superb. They both have a gift for connecting with the-little-people.*** 

Dental issues and pepitas

I lost a filling in a lower molar yesterday. It doesn't hurt but the cavity feels enormous. I suspect that there is not enough tooth left to repair it and the dentist will advise that I get a crown.

Mrs ERJ is supportive. In spite of the fact that I am becoming higher-maintenance, she isn't making any noise about trading-me-in for a newer model.

Very early on, in our relationship, I observed that her VW rabbit had 147k miles on it and I asked her "Why don't you get a newer car?"

Her response was "There is nothing wrong with this car. I know where all of the controls are by-heart and it does everything that I need a car to do. Why would I get a new one?" 

To some guys, that would be an eccentric quirk. To me, that is a major feature. She doesn't discard items (or people) because she is bored with them or because the paint is faded and the doors have a few dents in them.

Pepitas

Pepitas are edible, inner-seeds of squash or pumpkin seeds. They are usually cleaned of their seed-coat by roasting but the coating can be removed by sudden depressurizing (the bends method) and some varieties of squash have "naked seeds".

In fact, the botanical name for most pumpkins, Acorn, Delicata, Zucchini and Spaghetti squash is Cucurbita pepo.

Ethnobotanists speculate that squashes were first domesticated for their seeds and only later were they selected for edible flesh.

In an austere situation, it is good to be mindful of the fact that pepitas are almost 50% edible fats/oils by weight and those are exactly the nutrients that are hardest to obtain in a subsistence enterprise. While the oil can be extracted and used as liquid oil, it is much easier to simply add the pepitas to your salad or munched on as snacks.

Don't throw squash seeds away after the SHTF. If nothing else, you can use them to bait mouse and squirrel traps.

Moving day report

You can say whatever you want about the older Gen-Z, but their "minimalist" approach to life makes them easy to move.

Two round trips and it was mostly done.

I got to tour the new house. They paid roughly $130 per square-foot. They shopped long-and-hard and figured out what was important to each party. One wanted a man-cave. One wanted a window for their plants...

I like the neighborhood it is in. It is a very good fit for their socio-economic and stage-of-life. It isn't so spendy that they will feel like bumpkins. It isn't so distressed that they will be afraid to go out at night. There were a couple of kids with a stand selling cookies beside the road...it was that kind of neighborhood.

The lot looks like it is perched on top of a feeder moraine. The longer moraine stretched from Lansing's Groesbeck/Post Oak neighborhood-to-Mason, Michigan and was mined out for gravel. It is now a series of spring-fed lakes. One of those lakes is a half-mile west of the lot.

The lot's boundaries are still a mystery. The lot to the west belongs to somebody who is "into" landscaping. They have switchgrass and pipevine and lots of interesting specimens, including an apple tree near the northwest corner of their house.

The lot to the south was more conventional.

Two of the (likely) boundary lines are defined by rows of Colorado Blue Spruce, a species that struggles with the mid-West's heat and humidity. They might have another ten years left in them...but maybe only five. There is also an ash tree that looks to be in astonishingly good health, perhaps due to woodpeckers. There is a Mountain Ash aka Rowan Tree that is near death's door. There were also two mulberry trees that were probably planted by birds.

In the yard-proper, there are Burning Bush specimens, a Flowering Dogwood, a Variegated leafed Beech tree. Oh, and a glider shaded by a grapevine. All very charming.

The herbaceous landscaping is heavy planted to deer resistant plants: Hostas, daylilies, mint, lemon-balm and so on. 

I applaud couple for seizing the day and moving earlier rather than later. They had the warm bodies. They had the vehicles. They had a beautiful day for moving. 

Presented with minimal comment

 

We had a short power outage yesterday.

Look at what is left of his whiskers and the toes on his left, hind foot.

Bonus meme

 

How many peppers in a pint of pickled peppers?

How many peppers in the pint of pickled peppers that Peter Piper preserved?

Three, if they were Stocky Red Roasters. I love the colors!

I recall reading an article about a man who had been tossed into prison in eastern-Europe (Hungary, Bulgaria or maybe Romania) and pretty much forgotten. The cell was whitewashed and the only window was so high that he could not see outside.

One day, he was given a ripe pepper (perhaps from a visitor). It was a brilliant red. He could not bring himself to eat it. He craved the color because he had been starved of visual stimuli. Day-by-day, week-by-week it dried into a shriveled, wrinkled nugget. The color became muted. 

He never ate that pepper. It was one of the anchors that helped him stay sane. 

Duck eggs. The one on the right is from a mature duck. The one on the left is a young ducks first egg.

Rabbit traps?

I heard Mrs ERJ say that she had found a large number of "rabbit traps" in the barn.

That piqued my interest. I was eager to see what she had found.