Belts, Back-up cameras, Hour-meters, Potatoes and weeds and Tollund Man

You can imagine my dismay when my belt broke. It broke at the buckle. The loop on one side of the prong gave up the ghost.

Never fear, I have a back-up. Unfortunately, the leather shrunk while in storage. Mrs ERJ tells me this happens all of the time, especially for long slender items like belts.

I asked her if any of HER belts had ever shrunk and she admitted they had not.

It was with great sadness that I went down to the Bentonville General Store and bought a new belt.

Today I repaired my broken belt. I used some nylon webbing and two Chicago Screws. In case you are not familiar with Chicago screws, they are a threaded fastener that mimics a rivet.

Once again I have a belt and a back-up. Life is good.

Speaking of back-up

I installed a back-up camera on my truck today. It can be installed in two different modes. One mode is powered by the Auxiliary Power Outlet (a device formerly known as a cigarette lighter). The other mode ties it in with the back-up lamps and it only energizes when backing up.

I opted for the first mode. I have a cap on the truck and sometimes I want to know what is following behind when I am driving.

I bought two units on-line for about $40 each. The other unit is going into Mrs ERJ's vehicle. She wants me to tie it in to the back-up lamps.

Hour meter

One of my readers advised me to install an hour-meter on my small generator to keep track of the 25 hour oil-change intervals.

I installed it today and validated that it works. Thanks to whoever gave me that advice.

Stock watering tanks

If we go on a trip to visit Ducky and Jerry, then I need to improve my stock watering system. They are currently drinking about 30 gallons a day and I can go two days between refills.

A couple of 60 gallon, plastic barrels would stretch that to six days. I would have to cut them in half because cattle can tip over containers that are taller than 27 inches. The pain-in-the-butt is that it is manpower intensive to fill up 6, 30 gallon containers. 

It is far easier to have one, 150 gallon tank and a hose aimed at it. Then if our stay is extended and I have to call-in some help all they have to do is turn on the spigot and let it run for a half hour and then turn it off.

It is possible to purchase valves that are very similar to the float in your toilet bowl. As the cattle drink, the float drops and the tank refills. That will involve splicing a length of hose on the end of the poly line I have run out to the tanks.

Weeds

This is a little bit odd.

I weeded one row of potatoes and left the rows to either side unweeded. My rational was that I expect this variety (Megachip) to be very productive and I am weeding from highest-priority to lowest-priority. This is the gardener's version of "Fault Tolerant Programming". Feces happens. Structure your work to maximize gain regardless of random noise.

You can see the towering Lambsquarters on the neighboring rows. Four weeks of rain will do that.

What worked best was to pull weeds with my left hand and to hold a pair of pruning snips in my right hand. Tomorrow, I will have a lanyard holding the snips so I can pull with both hands until I need the snips.

The snips are exceptionally handy when there is a towering weed that is within 6" of a potato plant. Pulling those weeds will also pull up the potato plant. The elegant solution is to apply the snips and holler "TIMBER" as it crashes to the ground. 

Lambsquarters and Smartweed

Pale Persicaria is more likely to be known as "Smartweed" in the US. Fat-Hen is more likely to be known as "Lambsquarters".

Tollund Man is back in the news. His body was found in a bog in Denmark back  in 1951. His cause of death was hanging. His estimated date of death was 2400 years ago.

A recent study took samples from the content of his lower intestine and analyzed them. They determined that most of what he ate was barley but a significant portion of his porridge consisted of "weed" seeds.

A detour: Lysenko was Stalin's Head of Agriculture in the 1930s and '40s. Lysenko was a lunatic and was responsible for millions of USSR citizens starving to death.

One of his hair-brained ideas was that if you planted common grass seeds in a wheat field and if you treated them exactly as if they were wheat, then you would be able to harvest full crop of wheat from that field. This was an extension of the Marxist Nature/Nurture question; Marxist believing that outcomes were 100% Nurture and 0% Nature.

OK, we are all done laughing.

But... extend Lysenko's hypothesis over two-hundred years of casual selection.

Don't eliminate the wheat or rye or barley but broadcast it over the roughed-up field.

The weed phenotypes that will thrive alongside the wheat and rye and barley will be the ones that produce prodigious numbers of seeds. Prodigious numbers of seeds implies non-trivial weight of seeds.

Those phenotypes will either match the primary crop in season or will compliment it. Smartweed and Lambsquarters are "matchers". Chickweed and deadnettles are "complimenters".

Agriculture created the "Weeds" we know today. Before human agriculture, the ecological niche for annuals that produced enormous amounts of seeds was a very narrow niche restricted to unusual environments like sandbars where ephemeral flood-waters created open "fields".

Bronze-age agriculturalists didn't spend a lot of energy weeding their fields. They broadcast planted them, let them grow and then harvested them, cereal grains and weeds alike and threshed them all together. Calories are calories.

For the record, I was weeding lambsquarters, amaranth (also called pigweed or redroot), smartweed, foxtail and some kind of small-berried solanum species out of the potatoes today. Unlike Old-World cereal grains, potato plants are large, widely spaced and the relative productivity differences makes it well worth my time to weed them.

From the standpoint of Tollund Man's peers, a pound of (weed) seeds from 40-to-200 square-feet of land was a huge windfall relative to what they could find by foraging. By comparison, a typical yield in the US Corn Belt is a pound of corn (maize) for every four square feet.