Dis, dat an da udder-ting

Monge Lilac

Today was a little bit of working on the guest bedroom, a little bit of caring for the cattle and a little time in the orchard.

Cattle and water

The weather is ideal for maple sap running. Below freezing at night. Above freezing during the day. We are in a three day period where the temps are staying high and the pasture squishes when I walk across it.

I had been trucking water out to the calves which are a 1/4 mile from the road. Obviously, I did that in the morning while the ground was frozen. That didn't seem like a path to success with the ground not frozen and I didn't relish humping water that far.

So I stretched a hose as far as I could and humped it the rest of the way. I really didn't count but I figure it was close to 90 gallons that I moved, 10 gallons per trip. I could fib but it was only 75 yards from the end of the hose to the fence where the stock tank is located. I have a LOT of hose.

I carefully drained the hose after moving the water. I don't need to have it freeze and split.

Orchard

The day was warm and sunny.

Mrs ERJ and I made a date of it and we dragged wood from pruning out of the orchard and stacked it in the garden to be burned.

Once upon a time I tried to cut the wood and compost it in-place just like wood that fell in the forest. The downside was that it was hazardous to pick fruit in the fall. The branches from fruit trees tends toward being crooked and I could never cut it short enough to have it lay flat. Consequently it became a trip-twisted ankle hazard.

With all the talk of rising food prices, I am getting serious about harvesting as much fruit as possible and that means making the orchard floor user-friendly.

I still have some "holes" in the orchard. I know that a few of them are from where yellow jackets had nested below ground. I was fretting about where I was going to get dirt to fill those holes when I realized that the ever-lovely and industrious Mrs ERJ wanted to the drywall that we had taken out of the bedroom we are re-doing. I think the orchard is about to get some gypsum applied to it.

Lilacs

eBay has a seller, dogwooderitternet, who marks down last year's stock and sells it cheap this time of year. Plants go for about $8 each and he combines shipping costs if you buy multiples.

I bought lilacs from him/her last year and I am buying some more plants this year.

The plants are pot-bound and you need to make vertical slices to cut the roots that circled the pot but you will not find a better price on high-end, hybrid lilacs.

For the record, they will be planted up-wind of the house and will have a backdrop of White Pine trees. I picked Monge (reddish-purple), Betsy Ross (white) and Katherine Havemeyer (lilac colored). They should be visually spectacular and fragrant.

My goal is to never have to buy flowers for Mother's Day.

Zeus's saddle-bags

Himal Outdoors Dog Backpack

This was a good purchase. Zeus seems to strut when he is wearing it.

BPA

Brutus commented on an earlier post "Regarding plastic, how do we know that the plastic won't be leaching hormone disrupting chemicals (BPA, etc.) into your food supply."

There are several different kinds of plastic. BPA is a monomer or precursor to polycarbonate. Monomers are like links in a chain and with the aid of a catalyst, the monomers join together to form polymers. Not every molecule of the monomers is consumed. It is a statistical thing. As more dance-partners pair the unpaired dancers become more scattered and some don't find a partner.

Consequently, polycarbonate will leach out some BPA that was not consumed in the polymerization.

Vinyl is notable for being responsive to plasticizers. Vinyl (PVC) can be rigid like in water pipes or it can be flexible like your shower curtains. The primary difference is the amount of plasticizer compounded into the finished product. 

PVC is not my favorite polymer from an environmental standpoint because the plasticizer smells and it out-gasses over time. PVC contains chlorine in the polymer and burning PVC has been documented as emitting dioxin which is a powerful carcinogen. From a personal standpoint, I worked in a shop that did a lot of resistance spot welding and the safety department LOVED PVC curtains to contain the sparks. Over time, the sparks vaporized the curtains and the safety department added more.

Most garden mulch is polyethylene. Polyethylene is also available in nearly rigid forms and in very flexible forms. The difference between PVC and polyethylene is that the variation in flexibility for polyethylene is controlled by the length of the polymer chains (molecular weight) and by the degree of cross-linking between the chains.

Polyethylene is also widely available to manufacturers as "post consumer" pellets. That is, recycled milk jugs. No material is "free" from an environmental standpoint but recycled milk jugs pigmented with carbon is pretty close.