Not all accidents have sad outcomes

 

Sprinklers in the potato patch. Potatoes like soil that is evenly moist through the growing season. Soil that has large excursions in moisture grows lumpy, uneven potatoes that are difficult to peel.

The day before yesterday was spent sorting out the sprinkler situation for the garden(s).

This was the state-of-affairs by 9:30 AM. I had two impulse sprinklers up on tee-posts.

The closer sprinkler would not adjust. If you look at the dirt around the tee-post you can see that it is quickly getting wet (dark) close to the tee-post but not closer to me. I fiddled with the adjustments but the jet still "fuzzed up" way too fast.

I found another impulse sprinkler and it was better. It responded to the adjustments.

I tried to get a picture of Brutus whipping his tongue though the grass like a sickle but he was too fast for me. Who knew that I would have cattle with Communist tongues?

There are many demands for water from the house.

The calves continue to eat and to grow. The grass is at the stage where the calves are swinging their tongues out and pulling in just the tops of the grass. They clamp down and yank out just the seed heads.

That leaves the grass all stalk and spiky. Typically, at this stage a good pasture-farmer would mow immediately after the cattle left a paddock because it is unlikely that the cattle would be able to get at the leafy grass beneath the stalky remains the next time around. 

The leaves that are standing today will be unpalatable next time around. They will be tough and might have mildew growing on them.

When it is +80 degrees, I need to check their water every day. If they need water, I need to move the hose from the sprinklers or the drip irrigation to the orchard and fill their tanks.

Calves won't leave the hose alone so I have to "supervise" to ensure the water goes in the tanks. I haven't timed it but it takes about thirty minutes to run sixty gallons out to their watering tanks.

Vineyard

My "vineyard" is all of three rows long. The northern row was planted late-in-the-season. It was an afterthought. I had a bunch of random cuttings going and I plopped them into place. Random is a charitable word. Many of the cuttings were local, wild V. riparia grapes.

I optimistically thought "I can use them as rootstock and graft them". "Optimistic" because grapes are not easy to graft. They don't build up girth quickly so the grafts are fragile. They don't callous (heal) well in cool weather and the buds extend so quickly that they can quickly overrun the poorly healed graft.

Grapes are a high-labor crop. It crushes small commercial growers who cannot afford to mechanize. It is a little bit different for dabblers like me because I get paid four times. I taste the wine in my mind in the winter while I am pruning the vines. I taste it again in late spring while positioning and tying up the shoots. I taste it while picking and then, finally, I taste it when I actually take a sip from the wine-glass.

It is a bit like the canard "People who heat with wood find themselves warmed three times".

So there I was, tying up shoots when I noticed the flower clusters on the shoot I was working with. That was odd. It had not flowered yet.

V. riparia cluster at 600 b50 Growing Degree Days. Note that the cluster is elongated and the fruit is well defined and rounded.

Not-riparia. Note that flower clusters are still tightly packed. Picture taken at 600 b50 GDD.

At this point in the season, V. riparia (a very early flowering species) has fruit the size of #9 shot and none of the other varieties have even started to flower.

Then I looked at the other shoots on the vine. The clusters on those shoots had not flowered yet, either. Hmmm! This vine must not be V. riparia but a "real" variety. There must have been at least one cultivated grape in that batch of cuttings.

Curious, I walked up-and-down the row. More than half of the grape plants were cultivated grapes.

That changed the scope of the day's project. Instead of tying up shoots to maximize sun exposure, I started pruning the V. riparia to favor the cultivated grapes.

What a weird twist. In Isaiah Chapter 5 the landowner plants what he believes were domestic grape cuttings and got wild grapes while the opposite happened to me.

The Old Testament story is understandable. Wild grapes often grow much more vigorously than domesticated grapes. They don't have the fruit-load so they can generate much more vine...especially the individuals that are males, i.e. only produce pollen. If you sent out a servant to collect cuttings he could fill has basket far more quickly by taking cuttings from the wild vines.

A further complication is that most wild species of grapes have female, fruit producing vines and male, pollen producing vines. The earliest clones of grapes probably still had that single-sex trait. Planting all females will not give you a crop. You need at least one male vine upwind of the females. Consequently, a well managed vineyard back in the day of Isaiah probably had some male vines, non-fruiting vines IN THE VINEYARD. You would have to mind your Ps-and-Qs to ensure you didn't take cuttings from a male vine.

A long story to point out that being forgetful and careless does not always have a bad outcome.

Yesterday was a "Mom" day

One of mom's neighbors thinks grass is boring. She landscaped her front yard with flowering perennials.

She loves the color blue and this is currently her favorite plant: "Electric Blue" Penstemon. The blooms are much brighter than one would expect from the level of visible light so I wonder if they fluoresce under UV.

This pink flower is also a Penstemon. The Genus is very common in the inter-mountain, American west.

Close-up of a penstemon flower. The long, tubular structure shouts "specialized pollinator". I suspect the red-toned ones are very attractive to hummingbirds. Not my image.